BIRKElcY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 univ:r,ity of 
 california 
 
THE LOGIC OF HEGEL 
 
 WALL ACE 
 
THE LOGIC OF HEGEL 
 
 TRANSLATED FROM 
 
 THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF THE 
 PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES 
 
 WILLIAM WALLACE, M.A., LL.D. 
 
 FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE 
 AND WHYTe's professor OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD 
 
 SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND AUGMENTED 
 
 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
tOAN STACK 
 
 FIRST EDITION 1873 
 
 SECOND EDITION 1892 
 
 REPRINTED I904 
 
 Reprinted lithographically in Great Britain 
 
 by LOWE & BRYDONE (PRINTERS) LTD., LONDON 
 
 from sheets of the second edition 
 1931. 1950. 1959 
 
 oicm 
 
13 P-'?/? 
 
 E6-W3 
 
 NOTE 
 
 The present volume contains a translation, which 
 has been revised throughout and compared with the 
 original, of the Logic as given in the first part of 
 Hegel's Encyclopaedia, preceded by a bibliographical 
 account of the three editions and extracts from the 
 prefaces of that work, and followed by notes and 
 illustrations of a philological rather than a philo- 
 sophical character on the text. This introductory 
 chapter and these notes were not included in the 
 previous edition. 
 
 The volume containing my Prolegomena is under 
 
 revision and will be issued shortly. 
 
 W. W. 
 
 557 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Bibliographical Notice on the three Editions and three 
 Prefaces of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical 
 Sciences ix 
 
 THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 iNfTROPUCTlON 3 
 
 CHAPTER H. 
 Preliminary Notion 30 
 
 CHAPTER HI. 
 First Attitude of Thought to Objectivity ... 60 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 Second Attitude of Thought to Objectivity : — 
 
 I. Empiricism ........ 76 
 
 n. The Critical Philosophy 8a 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 Third Attitude of Thought to Objectivity : — 
 
 Immediate or Intuitive Knowledge . . . . . lai 
 
 CHAP^-ER VI. 
 Logic further Defined and Divided 143 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 First Subdivision of Logic : — 
 
 The Doctrine of Being . . . . . . . 156 
 
vm 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 Second Subdivision of Logic : — 
 
 Tht Doctrine ef Essence . 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 Third Subdivision of Logic : — 
 The Doctrine of the Notion 
 
 207 
 
 287 
 
 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 On Chapter I 
 II 
 III 
 IV . 
 V 
 
 VI . 
 
 VII , 
 VIII 
 IX , 
 
 383 
 387 
 395 
 398 
 406 
 409 
 410 
 
 417 
 424 
 
 INDEX 
 
 433 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE 
 
 ON THE THREE EDITIONS AND THREE 
 PREFACES OF THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA 
 
 The Encyclopaedia of the Philos.ophical Sciences 
 IN Outline is the third in time of the four works which 
 Hegel pubhshed. It was preceded by the Phenomeno- 
 logy of Spirit, in 1807, and the Science of Logic (in 
 two volumes), in 1812-16, and was followed by the OuU 
 lines of the Philosophy of Law in 1820. The only 
 other works which came directly from his hand are a 
 few essays, addresses, and reviews. The earliest of 
 these appeared in the Critical Journal of Philosophy, 
 issued by his friend Schelling and himself, in 1802 — 
 when Hegel was one and thirty, which, as Bacon 
 thought, ' is a great deal of sand in the hour-glass ' ; 
 and the latest were his contributions to the Jahrbiicher 
 fiir wissenschaftliche Kritik, in the year of his death 
 (1831). 
 
 This Encyclopaedia is the only complete, matured, 
 and authentic statement of Hegel's philosophical system. 
 But, as the title-page bears, it is only an outline ; and 
 its primary aim is to supply a manual for the guidance 
 of his students. In its mode of exposition the free 
 flight of speculation is subordinated to the needs of the 
 professorial class-room. Pegasus is put in harness. 
 
X THE THREE PREFACES 
 
 Paragraphs concise in form and saturated with mean- 
 ing postulate and presuppose the presiding spirit of 
 the lecturer to fuse them into continuity and raise them 
 to higher lucidity. Yet in two directions the works of 
 Hegel furnish a supplement to the defects of the 
 Encyclopaedia. 
 
 One of these aids to comprehension is the Pheno- 
 menology of Spirit, published in his thirty-seventh year. 
 It may be going too far to say with David Strauss that 
 it is the Alpha and Omega of Hegel, and his later 
 writings only extracts from it \ Yet here the Pegasus 
 of mind soars free through untrodden fields of air, 
 and tastes the joys of first love and the pride of fresh 
 discovery in the quest for truth. The fire of young 
 enthusiasm has not yet been forced to hide itself 
 and smoulder away in apparent calm. The mood is 
 Olympian — far above the turmoil and bitterness of 
 lower earth, free from the bursts of temper which 
 emerge later, when the thinker has to mingle in the 
 fray and endure the shafts of controversy. But the 
 Phenomenology, if not less than the Encyclopaedia it 
 contains the diamond purity of Hegelianism, is a key 
 which needs consummate patience and skill to use 
 with advantage. If it commands a larger view, it de- 
 mands a stronger wing of him who would join its 
 voyage through the atmosphere of thought up to its 
 purest empyrean. It may be the royal road to the 
 Idea, but only a kingly soul can retrace its course. 
 
 The other commentary on the Encyclopaedia 'ts, 
 supplied partly by Hegel's other published writings, 
 and partly by the volumes (IX-XV in the Collected 
 works) in which his editors have given his Lectures 
 on the Philosophy of History, on Aesthetic, on the 
 Philosophy of Religion, and on the History of Philo- 
 ' Christian Mdrklin, cap. 3. 
 
OF THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA. XI 
 
 sophy. All of these lectures, as well as the Philosophy 
 of Law, published by himself, deal however only with 
 the third part of the philosophic system. That system 
 (p. 28) includes (i) Logic, (ii) Philosophy of Nature, and 
 (iii) Philosophy of Spirit. It is this third part — or 
 rather it is the last two divisions therein (embracing the 
 great general interests of humanity, such as law and 
 morals, religion and art, as well as the development of 
 philosophy itself) which form the topics of Hegel's most 
 expanded teaching. It is in this region that he has 
 most appealed to the liberal culture of the century, and 
 influenced (directly or by reaction) the progress of 
 that philosophical history and historical philosophy of 
 which our own generation is reaping the fast-accumu- 
 lating fruit. If one may foist such a category into 
 systematic philosophy, we may say that the study of the 
 ' Objective ' and 'Absolute Spirit ' is the most interesting 
 part of Hegel. 
 
 Of the second part of the system there is less to be 
 said. For nearly half a century the study of nature has 
 passed almost completely out of the hands of the philo- 
 sophers into the care of the specialists of science. 
 There are signs indeed everywhere— and among others 
 Helmholtz has lately reminded us— that the higher 
 order of scientific students are ever and anon driven by 
 the very logic of their subject into the precincts or 
 the borders of philosophy. But the name of a Philo- 
 sophy of Nature still recalls a time of hasty enthusiasms 
 and over-grasping ambition of thought which, in its 
 eagerness to understand the mystery of the universe, 
 jumped to conclusions on insufficient grounds, trusted 
 to bold but fantastic analogies, and lavished an unwise 
 contempt on the plodding industry of the mere hodman 
 of facts and experiments. Calmer retrospection will 
 perhaps modify this verdict, and sift the various contri- 
 
Xll THE THREE PREFACES 
 
 butions (towards a philosophical unity of the sciences) 
 which are now indiscriminately damned by the title of 
 NaturphUo Sophie. For the present purpose it need 
 only be said that, for the second part of the Hegelian 
 system, we are restricted for explanations to the notes 
 collected by the editors of Vol. VII. part i. of the 
 Collected works — notes derived from the annotations 
 which Hegel himself supplied in the eight or more 
 courses of lectures which he gave on the Philosophy of 
 Nature between 1804 and 1830. 
 
 Quite other is the case with the Logic— the first 
 division of the Encyclopaedia. There we have the 
 collateral authority of the 'Science of Logic,' the larger 
 Logic which appeared whilst Hegel was schoolmaster at 
 Niirnberg. The idea of a new Logic formed the natural 
 sequel to the publication of the Phenomenology in 1807. 
 In that year Hegel was glad to accept, as a stop-gap and 
 pot-boiler, the post of editor of the Bamberg Journal. 
 But his interests lay in other directions, and the circum- 
 stances of the time and country helped to determine 
 their special form. 'In Bavaria,' he says in a letter \ 
 ' it looks as if organisation were the current business.' 
 A very mania of reform, says another, prevailed. 
 Hegel's friend and fellow-Swabian, Niethammer, held 
 an important position in the Bavarian education office, 
 and wished to employ the philosopher in the work of 
 carrying out his plans of re-organising the higher edu- 
 cation of the Protestant subjects of the crown. He 
 asked if Hegel would write a logic for school use, and 
 if he cared to become rector of a grammar school. 
 Hegel, who was already at work on his larger Logic, was 
 only half-attracted by the suggestion. * The traditional 
 Logic,' he replied'*, 'is a subject on which there are 
 text-books enough, but at the same time it is one which 
 * Hegel's Briefe, i. 141, "^ Ibid, i. 172. 
 
OF THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA. xiii 
 
 can by no means remain as it is : it is a thing nobody 
 can make anything of: 'tis dragged along like an old 
 heirloom, only because a substitute — of which the want 
 is universally felt— is not yet in existence. The whole 
 of its rules, still current, might be written on two pages : 
 every additional detail beyond these two is perfectly 
 fruitless scholastic subtlety ; — or if this logic is to get a 
 thicker body, its expansion must come from psycho- 
 logical paltrinesses.' Still less did he like the prospect of 
 instructing in theolog}', as then rationalised. 'To write 
 a logic and to be theological instructor is as bad as to 
 be white-washer and chimney-sweep at once.' 'Shall 
 he, who for many long years built his eyry on the wild 
 rock beside the eagle and learned to breathe the free 
 air of the mountains, now learn to feed on the carcases 
 of dead thoughts or the still-born thoughts of the 
 moderns, and vegetate in the leaden air of mere 
 babble ^ ? ' 
 
 At Nilrnberg he found the post of rector of the 
 'gymnasium' by no means a sinecure. The school 
 had to be made amid much lack of funds and general 
 bankruptcy of apparatus:— all because of an 'all- 
 powerful and unalterable destiny which is called the 
 course of business.' One of his tasks was ' by graduated 
 exercises"to introduce his pupils to speculative thought,' 
 — and that in the space of four hours weekly". Of its 
 practicability — and especially with himself as instra- 
 ment — he had grave doubts. In theory, he held that 
 an intelligent study of the ancient classics was the best 
 introduction to philosophy ; and practically he preferred 
 starting his pupils with the principles of law, morality 
 and religion, and reserving the logic and higher 
 philosophy for the highest class. Meanwhile he con- 
 
 1 Hegel's Briefe, i. 138. ' Ibid. i. 339. 
 
xiv THE THREE PREFACES 
 
 tinued to work on his great Logic, the first volume of 
 which appeared in two parts, 1812, 1813, and the second 
 in 1816. 
 
 This is the work which is the real foundation of the 
 Hegelian philosophy. Its aim is the systematic re- 
 organisation of the commonwealth of thought. It gives 
 not a criticism, like Kant ; not a principle, like Fichte ; 
 not a bird's eye view of the fields of nature and history, 
 like Schelling; it attempts the hard work of re-con- 
 structing, step by step, into totality the fragments of the 
 organism of intelligence. It is scholasticism, if scho- 
 lasticism means an absolute and all-embracing system ; 
 but it is a protest against the old school-system and 
 those who tried to rehabilitate it through their compre- 
 hensions of the Kantian theory. Apropos of the logic 
 of his contemporary Fries (whom he did not love), 
 published in 181 1, he remarks: 'His paragraphs are 
 mindless, quite shallow, bald, trivial ; the explanatory 
 notes are the dirty linen of the professorial chair, 
 utterly slack and unconnected \' Of himself he thus 
 speaks : ' I am a schoolmaster who has to teach philo- 
 sophy, — who, possibly for that reason, believes that 
 philosophy like geometry is teachable, and must no less 
 than geometry have a regular structure. But again, a 
 knowledge of the facts in geometry and philosophy is 
 one thing, and the mathematical or philosophical talent 
 which procreates and discovers is another : my province 
 is to discover that scientific form, or to aid in the forma- 
 tion of it^' So he writes to an old college friend ; and 
 in a letter to the rationalist theologian Paulus, in 1814^, 
 he professes : ' You know that I have had too much to 
 do not merely with ancient literature, but even with 
 mathematics, latterly with the higher analysis, differen- 
 
 ' Hegel's Briefe, i. 328. ' Ibid. i. 273. ' Ibid. i. 373. 
 
OF THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA. xv 
 
 tial calculus, chemistry, to let myself be taken in by 
 the humbug of SRaturp^ilofop^ie, philosophising without 
 knowledge of fact and by mere force of imagination, and 
 treating mere fancies, even imbecile fancies, as Ideas.' 
 
 In the autumn of 1816 Hegel became professor of 
 philosophy at Heidelberg. In the following year ap- 
 peared the first edition of his Encyclopaedia : two 
 others appeared in his lifetime (in 1827 and 1830). 
 The first edition is a thin octavo volume of pp. xvi. 
 288, published (like the others) at Heidelberg. The 
 Logic in it occupies pp. 1-126 (of which 12 pp. are 
 ©inleitung and 18 pp. a3or6egriff ) ; the Philosophy of 
 Nature, pp. 127-204 ; and the Philosophy of Mind 
 (Spirit), pp. 205-288. 
 
 In the Preface the book is described (p. iv) as 
 setting forth 'a new treatment of philosophy on a 
 method which will, as I hope, yet be recognised as the 
 only genuine method identical with the content.* Con- 
 trasting his own procedure with a mannerism of the 
 day which used an assumed set of formulas to produce 
 in the facts a show of symmetry even more arbitrary 
 and mechanical than the arrangements imposed ab 
 extra in the sciences, he goes on : ' This wilfulness 
 we saw also take possession of the contents of philo- 
 sophy and ride out on an intellectual knight-errantry — 
 for a while imposing on honest true-hearted workers, 
 though elsewhere it was only counted grotesque, and 
 grotesque even to the pitch of madness. But oftener 
 and more properly its teachings — far from seeming im- 
 posing or mad — were found out to be familiar trivialities, 
 and its form seen to be a mere trick of wit, easily 
 acquired, methodical and premeditated, with its quaint 
 combinations and strained eccentricities, — the mien of 
 earnestness only covering self-deception and fraud upon 
 the public. On the other side, again, we saw shallow- 
 
^^ THE THREE PREFACES 
 
 ness and unintelligence assume the character of a 
 scepticism wise in its own eyes and of a criticism 
 modest in its claims for reason, enhancing their vanity 
 and conceit in proportion as their ideas grew more vacu- 
 ous. For a space of time these two intellectual ten- 
 dencies have befooled German earnestness, have tired 
 out Its profound craving for philosophy, and have been 
 succeeded by an indifference and even a contempt for 
 philosophic science, till at length a self-styled modesty 
 has the audacity to let its voice be heard in controver- 
 sies touching the deepest philosophical problems, and 
 to deny philosophy its right to that cognition by reason 
 the form of which was what formerly was called 
 demonstration* 
 
 'The first of these phenomena may be in part ex- 
 plained as the youthful exuberance of the new age 
 which has risen in the realm of science no less than in 
 the world of politics. If this exuberance greeted with 
 rapture the dawn of the intellectual renascence, and 
 without profounder labour at once set about enjoying 
 the Idea and revelling for a while in the hopes and 
 prospects which it offered, one can more readily forgive 
 its excesses; because it is sound at heart, and the 
 surface vapours which it had suffused around its solid 
 worth must spontaneously clear off But the other 
 spectacle is more repulsive; because it betrays exhaus- 
 tion and impotence, and tries to conceal them under a 
 hectoring conceit which acts the censor over the philo- 
 sophical intellects of all the centuries, mistaking them, 
 but most of all mistaking itself. 
 
 'So much the more gratifying is another spectacle 
 yet to be noted ; the interest in philosophy and the 
 earnest love of higher knowledge which in the presence 
 ot both tendencies has kept itself single-hearted and 
 without affectation. Occasionally this interest may have 
 
OF THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA. xvii 
 
 taken too much to the language of intuition and feel- 
 ing; yet its appearance proves the existence of that 
 inward and deeper-reaching impulse of reasonable in- 
 telligence which alone gives man his dignity, — proves it 
 above all, because that standpoint can only be gained 
 as a result of philosophical consciousness ; so that what 
 it seems to disdain is at least admitted and recognised 
 as a condition. To this interest in ascertaining the 
 truth I dedicate this attempt to supply an introduction 
 and a contribution towards its satisfaction.' 
 
 The second edition appeared in 1827. Since the 
 autumn of 1818 Hegel had been professor at Berlin : 
 and the manuscript was sent thence (from August 1826 
 onwards) to Heidelberg, where Daub, his friend — him- 
 self a master in philosophical theology — attended to the 
 revision of the proofs. 'To the Introduction,' writes 
 Hegel ^, * I have given perhaps too great an amplitude : 
 but it, above all, would have cost me time and trouble 
 to bring within narrower compass. Tied down and 
 distracted by lectures, and sometimes here in Berlin 
 by other things too, I have— without a general survey 
 — allowed myself so large a swing that the work has 
 grown upon me, and there was a danger of its turn- 
 ing into a book. I have gone through it several times. 
 The treatment of the attitudes (of thought) which I 
 have distinguished in it was to meet an interest of the 
 day. The rest I have sought to make more definite, 
 and so far as may be clearer; but the main fault is 
 not mended — to do which would require me to limit 
 the detail more, and on the other hand make the 
 whole more surveyable, so that the contents should 
 better answer the title of an Encyclopaedia.' Again, in 
 Dec. 1826, he writes': 'In the 0tatur^^iIofo^^ie I have 
 made essential changes, but could not help here and 
 
 ^ Hegel's Briefe, iL 204. ■ Ibid. ii. 230. 
 
 VOL. II b 
 
xviii THE THREE PREFACES 
 
 there going too far into a detail which is hardly in 
 keeping with the tone of the whole. The second half 
 of the ®eifieS^^ilofo))^ie I shall have to modify entirely.' 
 In May 1827, Hegel offers his explanation of delay 
 in the preface, which, like the concluding paragraphs, 
 touches largely on contemporary theology. By August 
 of that year the book was finished, and Hegel off to 
 Paris for a holiday. 
 
 In the second edition, which substantially fixed the 
 form of the Encyclopaedia , the pages amount to xlii, 
 534 — nearly twice as many as the first, which, however, 
 as Professor Caird remarks, 'has a compactness, a 
 brief energy and conclusiveness of expression, which 
 he never surpassed.* The Logic now occupies pp. i- 
 214, Philosophy of Nature 215-354, and Philosophy 
 of Spirit from 355-534. The second part therefore 
 has gained least ; and in the third part the chief single 
 expansions occur towards the close and deal with 
 the relations of philosophy, art, and religion in the 
 State; viz. § 563 (which in the third edition is trans- 
 posed to § 552), and § 573 (where two pages are en- 
 larged to 18). In the first part, or the Logic, the main 
 increase and alteration falls within the introductory 
 chapters, where 96 pages take the place of 30. The 
 SSorfcegriff (preliminary notion) of the first edition had 
 contained the distinction of the three logical ' moments ' 
 (see p. 142), with a few remarks on the methods, first, of 
 metaphysic, and then (after a brief section on empiri- 
 cism), of the ' Critical Philosophy through which phi- 
 losophy has reached its close.' Instead of this the 
 second edition deals at length, under this head, with the 
 three 'attitudes (or positions) of thought to objectivity;' 
 where, besides a more lengthy criticism of the Critical 
 philosophy, there is a discussion of the doctrines of 
 Jacobi and other Intuitivists. 
 
OF THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA. xix 
 
 The Preface, like much else in this second edition, is 
 an assertion of the right and the duty of philosophy to 
 treat independently of the things of God, and an em- 
 phatic declaration that the result of scientific investiga- 
 tion of the truth is, not the subversion of the faith, but 
 'the restoration of that sum of absolute doctrine which 
 thought at first would have put behind and beneath 
 itself— a restoration of it however in the most charac- 
 teristic and the freest element of the mind.' Any oppo- 
 sition that may be raised against philosophy on religious 
 grounds proceeds, according to Hegel, from a religion 
 which has abandoned its true basis and entrenched 
 itself in formulae and categories that pervert its real 
 nature. 'Yet,' he adds (p. vii), ' especially where reli- 
 gious subjects are under discussion, philosophy is 
 expressly set aside, as if in that way all mischief were 
 banished and security against error and illusion at- 
 tained;* ... 'as if philosophy — the mischief thus kept 
 at a distance — were anything but the investigation of 
 Truth, but with a full sense of the nature and value of 
 the intellectual links which give unity and form to all 
 fact whatever.' ' Lessing,' he continues (p. xvi), ' said 
 in his time that people treat Spinoza like a dead 
 dog'. It cannot be said that in recent times Spinozism 
 and speculative philosophy in general have been better 
 treated.' 
 
 The time was one of- feverish unrest and unwhole- 
 some irritability. Ever since the so-called Carlsbad 
 decrees of 1819 all the agencies of the higher literature 
 and education had been subjected to an inquisitorial 
 supervision which everywhere surmised political insub- 
 ordination and religious heresy. A petty provincialism 
 pervaded what was then still the small 0ieftpcn3=6tabt 
 Berlin; and the King, Frederick William III, cherished 
 * Jacobi's Werke, iv. A, p, 63. 
 
XX THE THREE PREFACES 
 
 to the full that paternal conception of his position which 
 has not been unusual in the royal house of Prussia. 
 Champions of orthodoxy warned him that Hegelianism 
 was unchristian, if not even anti-christian. Franz von 
 Baader, the Bavarian religious philosopher (who had 
 spent some months at BerUn during the winter of 
 1823-4, studying the religious and philosophical teaching 
 of the universities in connexion with the revolutionary 
 doctrines which he saw fermenting througliout Europe), 
 addressed the king in a communication which described 
 the prevalent Protestant theology as infidel in its very 
 source, and as tending directly to annihilate the foun- 
 dations of the faith. Hegel himself had to remind the 
 censor of heresy that 'all speculative philosophy on 
 religion may be carried to atheism: all depends on who 
 carries it ; the peculiar piety of our times and the male- 
 volence of demagogues will not let us want carriers \' 
 His own theology was suspected both by the Rationa- 
 lists and by the Evangelicals. He writes to his wife 
 (in 1827) that he had looked at the university buildings 
 in Louvain and Liege with the feeling that they might 
 one day afford him a resting-place 'when the parsons in 
 Berlin make the Kupfergraben completely intolerable 
 for him^' 'The Roman Curia,' he adds, 'would be 
 a more honourable opponent than the miserable cabals 
 of a miserable boiling of parsons in Berlin.' Hence 
 the tone in which the preface proceeds (p. xviii). 
 
 ' ReUgion is the kind and mode of consciousness in 
 which the Truth appeals to all men, to men of every 
 degree of education; but the scientific ascertainment 
 of the Truth is a special kind of this consciousness, 
 involving a labour which not all but only a few under- 
 take. The substance of the two is the same ; but as 
 Homer says of some stars that they have two names,— 
 I Hegel's Briefe, ii. 54. » Ibid. u. 276. 
 
OF THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA. xxi 
 
 the one in the language of the gods, the other in the 
 language of ephemeral men — so for that substance there 
 are two languages, — the one of feeling, of pictorial 
 thought, and of the limited intellect that makes its 
 home in finite categories and inadequate abstractions, 
 the other the language of the concrete notion. If we 
 propose then to talk of and to criticise philosophy from 
 the religious point of view, there is more requisite 
 than to possess a familiarity with the language of the 
 ephemeral consciousness. The foundation of scientific 
 cognition is the substantiality at its core, the indwell- 
 ing idea with its stirring intellectual life ; just as the 
 essentials of religion are a heart fully disciplined, a 
 mind awake to self collectedness, a wrought and refined 
 substantiality. In modern times religion has more and 
 more contracted the intelligent expansion of its contents 
 and withdrawn into the intensiveness of piety, or even 
 of feeling, — a feeling which betrays its own scantiness 
 and emptiness. So long however as it still has a creed, 
 a doctrine, a system of dogma, it has what philosophy 
 can occupy itself with and where it can find for itself a 
 point of union with religion. This however is not to 
 be taken in the wrong separatist sense (so dominant in 
 our modern religiosity) representing the two as mutually 
 exclusive, or as at bottom so capable of separation that 
 their union is only imposed from without. Rather, even 
 in what has gone before, it is implied that religion may 
 well exist without philosophy, but philosophy not with- 
 out religion — which it rather includes. True religion 
 — intellectual and spiritual religion— must have body 
 and substance, for spirit and intellect are above all con- 
 sciousness, and consciousness implies an objective body 
 and substance. 
 
 'The contracted religiosity which narrows itself to a 
 point in the heart must make that heart's softening and 
 
 VOL. II b 3 
 
xxil THE THREE PREFACES 
 
 contrition the essential factor of its new birth ; but it 
 must at the same time recollect that it has to do with 
 the heart of a spirit, that the spirit is the appointed 
 authority over the heart, and that it can only have such 
 authority so far as it is itself born again. This new 
 birth of the spirit out of natural ignorance and natural 
 error takes place through instruction and through that 
 faith in objective truth and substance which is due to 
 the witness of the spirit. This new birth of the spirit 
 is besides ipso facto a new birth of the heart out of that 
 vanity of the onesided intellect (on which it sets so 
 much) and its discoveries that finite is different from 
 infinite, that philosophy must either be polytheism, or, 
 in acuter minds, pantheism, &c. It is, in short, a new 
 birth out of the wretched discoveries on the strength of 
 which pious humility holds its head so high against 
 philosophy and theological science. If religiosity per- 
 sists in clinging to its unexpanded and therefore un- 
 intelligent intensity, then it can be sensible only of the 
 contrast which divides this narrow and narrowing form 
 from the intelligent expansion of doctrine as such, re- 
 ligious not less than philosophical.* 
 
 After an appreciative quotation from Franz von Baader, 
 and noting his reference to the theosophy of Bohme, 
 as a work of the past from which the present generation 
 might learn the speculative interpretation of Christian 
 doctrines, he reverts to the position that the only 
 mode in which thought will admit a reconciliation with 
 religious doctrines, is when these doctrines have learned 
 to 'assume their worthiest phase — the phase of the 
 notion, of necessity, which binds, and thus also makes 
 free everything, fact no less than thought.' But it is 
 not from Bohme or his kindred that we are hkely to get 
 the example of a philosophy equal to the highest theme 
 — to the comprehension of divine things. ' If old things 
 
OF THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA. XXlll 
 
 are to be revived — an old phase, that is; for the 
 burden of the theme is ever young— the phase of the 
 Idea such as Plato and, still better, as Aristotle con- 
 ceived it, is far more deserving of being recalled, — and 
 for the further reason that the disclosure of it, by 
 assimilating it into our system of ideas, is, ipso facto, 
 not merely an interpretation of it, but a progress of the 
 science itself. But to interpret such forms of the Idea 
 by no means lies so much on the surface as to get hold 
 of Gnostic and Cabbalistic phantasmagorias ; and to 
 develope Plato and Aristotle is by no means the sinecure 
 that it is to note or to hint at echoes of the Idea in the 
 medievalists.' 
 
 The third edition of the Encyclopaedia, vv^hich ap- 
 peared in 1830, consists of pp. Iviii, 600— a slight 
 additional increase. The increase is in the Logic, 
 eight pages ; in the Philosophy of Nature, twenty-three 
 pages ; and in the Philosophy of Spirit, thirty-four 
 pages. The concrete topics, in short, gain most. 
 
 The preface begins by alluding to several criticisms 
 on his philosophy, — 'which for the most part have 
 shown little vocation for the business ' — and to his dis- 
 cussion of them in the Jahrhilcher of 1829 [Vermischte 
 Schrifien, ii. 149). There is also a paragraph devoted to 
 the quarrel originated by the attack in Hengstenberg's 
 Evangelical Journal on the rationalism of certain pro- 
 fessors at Halle (notably Gesenius and Wegscheider), — 
 (an attack based on the evidence of students' note-books), 
 and by the protest of students and professors against 
 the insinuations. ' It seemed a little while ago,' says 
 Hegel (p. xli), ' as if there was an initiation, in a scientific 
 spirit and on a wider range, of a more serious inquiry, 
 from the region of theology and even of religiosity, 
 touching God, divine things, and reason. But the very 
 beginning of the movement checked these hopes ; the 
 
XXIV THE THREE PREFACES 
 
 issue turned on personalities, and neither the preten- 
 sions of the accusing pietists nor the pretensions of the 
 free reason they accused, rose to the real subject, still 
 less to a sense that the subject could only be discussed 
 on philosophic soil. This personal attack, on the basis 
 of very special externalities of religion, displayed the 
 monstrous assumption of seeking to decide by arbitrary 
 decree as to the Christianity of individuals, and to 
 stamp them accordingly with the seal of temporal and 
 eternal reprobation. Dante, in virtue of the enthusiasm 
 of divine poesy, has dared to handle the keys of Peter, 
 and to condemn by name to the perdition of hell many 
 — already deceased however — of his contemporaries, 
 even Popes and Emperors. A modern philosophy has 
 been made the subject of the infamous charge that in it 
 human individuals usurp the rank of God ; but such a 
 fictitious charge — reached by a false logic — pales before 
 the actual assumption of behaving like judges of the 
 world, prejudging the Christianity of individuals, and 
 announcing their utter reprobation. The Shibboleth 
 of this absolute authority is the name of the Lord Christ, 
 and the assertion that the Lord dwells in the hearts of 
 these judges.' But the assertion is ill supported by the 
 fruits they exhibit, — the monstrous insolence with which 
 they reprobate and condemn. 
 
 But the evangelicals are not alone to blame for the 
 bald and undeveloped nature of their religious life ; the 
 same want of free and living growth in religion charac- 
 terises their opponents. ' By their formal, abstract, 
 nerveless reasoning, the rationalists have emptied re- 
 ligion of all power and substance, no less than the 
 pietists by the reduction of all faith to the Shibboleth 
 of Lord ! Lord ! One is no whit better than the other : 
 and when they meet in conflict there is no material on 
 which they could come into contact, no common ground. 
 
OF THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA. XXV 
 
 and no possibility of carrying on an inquiry which 
 would lead to knowledge and truth. " Liberal " theo- 
 logy on its side has not got beyond the formalism of 
 appeals to liberty of conscience, liberty of thought, 
 liberty of teaching, to reason itself and to science. 
 Such liberty no doubt describes the infinite right of 
 fhe spirit, and the second special condition of truth, 
 supplementary to the first, faith. But the rationalists 
 steer clear of the material point : they do not tell us the 
 reasonable principles and laws involved in a free and 
 genuine conscience, nor the import and teaching of free 
 faith and free thought ; they do not get beyond a bare 
 negative formalism and the liberty to embody their 
 liberty at their fancy and pleasure — whereby in the 
 end it matters not how it is embodied. There is a 
 further reason for their failure to reach a solid doctrine. 
 The Christian community must be, and ought always to 
 be, unified by the tie of a doctrinal idea, a confession of 
 faith ; but the generalities and abstractions of the stale, 
 not living, waters of rationalism forbid the specificality 
 of an inherently definite and fully developed body of 
 Christian doctrine. Their opponents, again, proud of 
 the name Lord ! Lord ! frankly and openly disdain 
 carrying out the faith into the fulness of spirit, reality, 
 and truth.' 
 
 In ordinary moods of mind there is a long way from 
 logic to religion. But almost every page of what Hegel 
 has called Logic is witness to the belief in their ultimate 
 identity. It was no new principle of later years for 
 him. He had written in post-student days to his friend 
 Schelling : ' Reason and freedom remain our watch- 
 word, and our point of union the invisible church ^' 
 His parting token of faith with another youthful com- 
 rade, the poet Holderlin, had been 'God's kingdom ^' 
 
 ' Hegel's Brie/e, i. 13. * Holderlin's Leben (Litzmann), p. 183. 
 
XXVI THREE PREFACES OF THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA. 
 
 But after 1827 this religious appropriation of philosophy 
 becomes more apparent, and in 1829 Hegel seemed 
 deliberately to accept the position of a Christian philo- 
 sopher which Goschel had marked out for him. 'A 
 philosophy without heart and a faith without intellect,' 
 he remarks \ 'are abstractions from the true life of 
 knowledge and faith. The man whom philosophy 
 leaves cold, and the man whom real faith does not 
 illuminate may be assured that the fault lies in them, 
 not in knowledge and faith. The former is still an 
 alien to philosophy, the latter an alien to faith.' 
 
 This is not the place — in a philological chapter — to 
 discuss the issues involved in the announcement that 
 the truth awaits us ready to hand ^ * in all genuine con- 
 sciousness, in all religions and philosophies.' Yet one 
 remark may be offered against hasty interpretations of a 
 'speculative' identity. If there is a double edge to the 
 proposition that the actual is the reasonable, there is 
 no less caution necessary in approaching and studying 
 from both sides the far-reaching import of that equation 
 to which Joannes Scotus Erigena gave expression ten 
 centuries ago : ' Non alia est philosophia, i. e. sapientiae 
 studium, et alia religio. Quid est aliud de philosophia 
 tractare nisi verae religionis regulas exponere ? ' 
 
 ' Fernt. Schr. ii. 144. ^ Hegel's Briefe, ii. 80. 
 
The following Errata in the Edition of the Logic as given 
 in the Collected Works {Vol. VI.) are corrected in the trans- 
 lation. The references in brackets are to the German text. 
 
 Page 95, line i. Unb DbieftitJttdt has dropped out after bet iSubjefti; 
 »itdt [VI. 98, 1. lo from bottom.] 
 
 P. 97, 1. 2. The and ed. reads (bie Oebanfen) nt^t in ©oI($CBt, 
 instead of nid^t afg in ©cld^em {yd cd.). [VI. p. 100, 1. 3 from 
 bottom.] 
 
 P. 169, 1. 13 from bottom. Instead of the reading of the Werke 
 and of the 3rd ed. read asin ed. II. 8l(fo ifi biefer ©egenftanb nicfltg. 
 [VI. p. 178, 1. II.] 
 
 P. 177, 1. 3 from bottom. S3erjianbe5;@egcnflanbc3 is a mistake for 
 a3erfianbe3,'@e0enfafce0, as in edd. II and III. [VI. p. 188, 1: a.] 
 
 P. 331, 1. 19. h)cittn should be toeitetn. [VI. p. 251, 1. 3 from 
 bottom.] 
 
 P. 316, 1. 15. !Dingli(^tcit is a misprint for 2)in0ftcit, as in Hegel's 
 own editions. [VI. p. 347, L i.] 
 
 P. 35a, 1. 14 from bottom, for feine Sbeatitdt read feiner Sbealitdt. 
 [VI. p. 385, 1.8.] 
 
THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC 
 
 {THE FIRST PART OF THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA 
 OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES 
 
 IN OUTLINE) 
 
 By G. W. F. HEGEL 
 
THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 1.] Philosophy misses an advantage enjoyed by 
 the other sciences. It cannot like them rest the 
 existence of its objects on the natural admissions of 
 consciousness, nor can it assume that its method of 
 cognition, either for starting or for continuing, is one 
 already accepted. The objects of philosophy, it is true, 
 are upon the whole the same as those of religion. In 
 both the object is Truth, in that supreme sense in which 
 God and God only is the Truth. Both in like manner 
 go on to treat of the finite worlds of Nature and the 
 human Mind, with their relation to each other and to 
 their truth in God. Some acquaintance with its objects, 
 therefore, philosophy may and even must presume, 
 that and a certain interest in them to boot, were it for 
 no other reason than this : that in point of time the 
 mind makes general images of objects, long before it 
 makes notions of them, and that it is only through these 
 mental images, and by recourse to them, that the think- 
 ing mind rises to know and comprehend thinkingly. 
 
 But with the rise of this thinking study of things, 
 it soon becomes evident that thought will be satisfied 
 with nothing short of showing the necessity of its 
 
4 INTRODUCTION. [i-a. 
 
 facts, of demonstrating the existence of its objects, 
 as well as their nature and qualities. Our original 
 acquaintance with them is thus discovered to be 
 inadequate. We can assume nothing, and assert 
 nothing dogmati :ally ; nor can we accept the assertions 
 and assumptions of others. And yet we must make a 
 beginning : and a beginning, as primary and underived, 
 makes an assumption, or rather is an assumption. It 
 seems as if it were impossible to make a oeginning 
 at all. 
 
 2.] This thinking study of things may serve, in a 
 general way, as a description of philosophy. But the 
 description is too wide. If it be correct to say, that 
 thought makes the distinction between man and the 
 lower animals, then everything human is human, for the 
 sole and simple reason that it is due to the operation 
 of thought. Philosophy, on the other hand, is a peculiar 
 mode of thinking — a mode in which thinking becomes 
 knowledge, and knowledge through notions. However 
 great therefore may be the identity and essential unity 
 of the two modes of thought, the philosophic mode gets 
 to be different from the more general thought which 
 acts in all that is human, in all that gives humanity its 
 distinctive character. And this difference connects 
 itself with the fact that the strictly human and thought- 
 induced phenomena of consciousness do not originally 
 appear in the form of a thought, but as a feeling, a 
 perception, or mental image— all of which aspects must 
 be distinguished from the form of thought proper. 
 
 According to an old preconceived idea, which has 
 passed into a trivial proposition, it is thought which 
 marks the man off from the animals. Yet trivial as this 
 old belief may seem, it must, strangely enough, be 
 recalled to mind in presence of certain preconceived 
 ideas of the present day. These ideas would put 
 
2.] PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION. 5 
 
 feeling and thought so far apart as to make them 
 opposites, and would represent them as so antagonistic, 
 that feeling, particularly religious feeling, is supposed 
 to be contaminated^, perverted, and even annihilated by 
 thought. They also emphatically hold that religion and 
 piety grow out of, and rest upon something else, and 
 not on thought. But those who make this separation 
 forget meanwhile that only man has the capacity for 
 religion, and that animals no more have religion than 
 they have law and morality. 
 
 Those who insist on this separation of religion from 
 thinking usually have before their minds the sort of 
 thought that may be styled after-thought. They mean 
 'reflective' thinking, which has to deal with thoughts 
 as thoughts, and brings them into consciousness. 
 Slackness to perceive and keep in view this distinction 
 which philosophy definitely draws in respect of think- 
 ing is the source of the crudest objections and re- 
 proaches against philosophy. Man,— and that just 
 because it is his nature to think, — is the oply being 
 that possesses law, religion, and morality. In these 
 spheres of human life, therefore, hinking, under the 
 guise of feeling, faith, or generalised image, has not 
 been inactive : its action and its productions are there 
 present and therein contained. But it is one thing to 
 have such feelings and generalised images that have 
 been moulded and permeated by thought, and another 
 thing to have thoughts about them. The thoughts, to 
 which after-thought upon those modes of consciousness 
 gives rise, are what is comprised under reflection, 
 general reasoning, and the like, as well as under philo- 
 sophy itself. 
 
 The neglect of this distinction between thought in 
 general and the reflective thought of philosophy has 
 also led to another and more frequent misunderstand- 
 
6 INTRODUCTION. [a-3. 
 
 ing. Reflection of this kind has been often maintained 
 to be the condition, or even the only way, of attaining 
 a consciousness and certitude of the Eternal and True. 
 The (now somewhat antiquated) metaphysical proofs of 
 God's existence, for example, have been treated, as if a 
 knowledge of them and a conviction of their truth were 
 the only and essential means of producing a belief and 
 conviction that there is a God. Such a doctrine would 
 find its parallel, if we said that eating was impossible 
 before we had acquired a knowledge of the chemical, 
 botanical, and zoological characters of our food ; and 
 that we must delay digestion till we had finished the 
 study of anatomy and physiology. Were it so, these 
 sciences in their field, like philosophy in its, would gain 
 greatly in point of utility; in fact, their utility would 
 rise to the height of absolute and universal indispen- 
 sableness. Or rather, instead of being indispensable, 
 they would not exist at all. 
 
 3.] The Content, of whatever kind it be, with which 
 our consciousness is taken up, is what constitutes the 
 qualitative character of our feelings, perceptions, fancies, 
 and ideas ; of our aims and duties ; and of our thoughts 
 and notions. From this point of view, feeling, per- 
 ception, &c. are the forms assumed by these contents. 
 The contents remain one and the same, whether 
 they are felt, seen, represented, or willed, and whether 
 they are merely felt, or felt with an admixture of 
 thoughts, or merely and simply thought. In any one 
 of these forms, or in the admixture of several, the con- 
 tents confront consciousness, or are its object. But 
 when they are thus objects of consciousness, the modes 
 of the several forms ally themselves with the contents ; 
 and each form of them appears in consequence to give 
 rise to a special object. Thus what is the same at 
 bottom, may look like a different sort of fact. 
 
3.] FORM AND CONTENT OF THOUGHT. 7 
 
 The several modes of feeling, perception, desire, and 
 will, so far as we are aware of them, are in general 
 called ideas (mental representations) : and it may be 
 roughly said, that philosophy puts thoughts, categories, 
 or, in more precise language, adequate notions, in the 
 place of the generalised images we ordinarily call ideas. 
 Mental impressions such as these may be regarded as 
 the metaphors of thoughts and notions. But to have 
 these figurate conceptions does not imply that we appre- 
 ciate their intellectual significance, the thoughts and 
 rational notions to which they correspond. Conversely, 
 it is one thing to have thoughts and intelligent notions, 
 and another to know what impressions, perceptions, 
 and feelings correspond to them. 
 
 This difference will to some extent explain what 
 people call the unintelligibility of philosophy. Their 
 difficulty lies partly in an incapacity — which in itself is 
 nothing but want of habit— for abstract thinking ; t. e. in 
 an inability to get hold of pure thoughts and move about 
 in them. In our ordinary state of mind, the thoughts 
 are clothed upon and made one with the sensuDus 
 or spiritual material of the hour; and in reflection, 
 meditation, and general reasoning, we introduce a blend 
 of thoughts into feelings, percepts, and mental images. 
 (Thus, in propositions where the subject-matter is due 
 to the senses — e. g. ' This leaf is green ' — we have such 
 categories introduced, as being and individuality.) But 
 it is a very different thing to make the thoughts pure 
 and simple our object. 
 
 But their complaint that philosophy is unintelligible 
 is as much due to another reason ; and that is an im- 
 patient wish to have before them as a mental picture 
 that which is in the mind as a thought or notion. When 
 people are asked to apprehend some notion, they often 
 complain that they do not know what they have to think. 
 
8 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 1 3-5. 
 
 But the fact is that in a notion there is nothing further 
 to be thought than the notion itself. What the phrase 
 reveals, is a hankering after an image with which we 
 are already familiar. The mind, denied the use of its 
 familiar ideas, feels the ground where it once stood firm 
 and at home taken away from beneath it, and, when 
 transported into the region of pure thought, cannot tell 
 where in the world it is. 
 
 One consequence of this weakness is that authors, 
 preachers, and orators are found most intelligible, when 
 they speak of things which their readers or hearers 
 already know by rote, — things which the latter are 
 conversant with, and which require no explanation. 
 
 4.] The philosopher then has to reckon with popular 
 modes of thought, and with the objects of religion. In 
 dealing with the ordinary modes of mind, he will first of 
 all, as we saw, have to prove and almost to awaken the 
 need for his peculiar method of knowledge. In dealing 
 with the objects of religion, and with truth as a whole, 
 he will have to show that philosophy is capable of ap- 
 prehending them from its own resources ; and should 
 a difference from religious conceptions come to light, 
 he will have to justify the points in which it diverges. 
 
 5.] To give the reader a preliminary explanation of 
 the distinction thus made, and to let him see at the 
 same moment that the real import of our consciousness 
 is retained, and even for the first time put in its proper 
 light, when translated into the form of thought and the 
 notion of reason, it may be well to recall another of 
 these old unreasoned beliefs. And that is the con- 
 viction that to get at the truth of any object or event, 
 even of feelings, perceptions, opinions, and mental ideas, 
 we must think it over. Now in any case to think things 
 over is at least to transform feelings, ordinary ideas, &c. 
 into thoughts. 
 
5-6.J THE CRITICS OF PHILOSOPHY. 9 
 
 Nature has given every one a faculty of thought. 
 But thought is all that philosophy claims as the form 
 proper to her business : and thus the inadequate view 
 which ignores the distinction stated in § 3, leads to 
 a new delusion, the -reverse of the complaint previously 
 mentioned about the unintelligibility of philosophy. 
 In other words, this science must often submit to the 
 slight of hearing even people who have never taken any 
 trouble with it talking as if they thoroughly under- 
 stood all about it. With no preparation beyond an 
 ordinary education they do not hesitate, especially 
 under the influence of religious sentiment, to philoso- 
 phise and to criticise philosophy. Everybody allows that 
 to know any other science you must have first studied 
 it, and that you can only claim to express a judg- 
 ment upon it in virtue of such knowledge. Everybody 
 allows that to make a shoe you must have learned and 
 practised the craft of the shoemaker, though every man 
 has a model in his own foot, and possesses in his hands 
 the natural endowments for the operations required. For 
 philosophy alone, it seems to be imagined, such study, 
 care, and application are not in the least requisite. 
 
 This comfortable view of what is required for a 
 philosopher has recently received corroboration through 
 the theory of immediate or intuitive knowledge. 
 
 6.] So much for the form of philosophical knowledge. 
 It is no less desirable, on the other hand, that philo- 
 sophy should understand that its content is no other 
 than actuality, that core of truth which, originally pro- 
 duced and producing itself within the precincts of the 
 mental life, has become the world, the inward and 
 outward world, of consciousness. At first we become 
 aware of these contents in what we call Experience. 
 But even Experience, as it surveys the wide range of 
 inward and outward existence, has sense enough to 
 
lO INTRODUCTION. [6. 
 
 distinguish the mere appearance, which is transient and 
 meaningless, from what in itself really deserves the 
 name of actuality. As it is only in form that philo- 
 sophy is distinguished from other modes of attaining an 
 acquaintance with this same sum of being, it must neces- 
 sarily be in harmony with actuality and experience. In 
 fact, this harmony may be viewed as at least an extrinsic 
 means of testing the truth of a philosophy. Similarly it 
 may be held the highest and final aim of philosophic 
 science to bring about, through the ascertainment of this 
 harmony, a reconciliation of the self-conscious reason 
 with the reason which is in the world, — in other words, 
 with actuality. 
 
 In the preface to my Philosophy of Law, p. xix, are 
 found the propositions : 
 
 What is reasonable is actual ; 
 and, What is actual is reasonable. 
 These simple statements have given rise to expressions 
 of surprise and hostility, even in quarters where it 
 would be reckoned an insult to presume absence of 
 philosophy, and still more of religion. Religion at 
 least need not be brought in evidence ; its doctrines of 
 the divine government of the world affirm these propo- 
 sitions too decidedly. For their philosophic sense, we 
 must pre-suppose intelligence enough to know, not only 
 that God is actual, that He is the supreme actuality, 
 that He alone is truly actual ; but also, as regards the 
 logical bearings of the question, that existence is in 
 part mere appearance, and only in part actuality. In 
 common life, any freak of fancy, any error, evil and 
 everything of the nature of evil, as well as every 
 degenerate and transitory existence whatever, gets 
 in a casual way the name of actuality. But even 
 our ordinary feelings are enough to forbid a casual 
 (fortuitous) existence getting the emphatic name of an 
 
6.] PHILOSOPHY DEALS WITH ACTUALITY. Ii 
 
 actual ; for by fortuitous we mean an existence which 
 has no greater value than that of something possible, 
 which may as well not be as be. As for the term 
 Actuality, these critics would have done well to consider 
 the sense in which I employ it. In a detailed Logic 
 I had treated amongst other things of actuality, and 
 accurately distinguished it not only from the fortuitous, 
 which, after all, has existence, but even from the cog- 
 nate categories of existence and the other modifications 
 of being. 
 
 The actuality of the rational stands opposed by the 
 popular fancy that Ideas and ideals are nothing but 
 chimeras, and philosophy a mere system of such 
 phantasms. It is also opposed by the very different 
 fancy that Ideas and ideals are something far too 
 excellent to have actuality, or something too im- 
 potent to procure it for themselves. This divorce 
 between idea and reality is especially dear to the 
 analytic understanding which looks upon its own 
 abstractions, dreams though they are, as something true 
 and real, and prides itself on the imperative ' ought,' 
 which it takes especial pleasure in prescribing even on 
 the field of politics. As if the world had waited on 
 it to learn how it ought to be, and was not 1 For, 
 if it were as it ought to be, what would come of the 
 precocious wisdom of that ' ought ' ? When understand- 
 ing turns this ' ought ' against trivial external and tran- 
 sitory objects, against social regulations or conditions, 
 which very likely possess a great relative importance 
 for a certain time and special circles, it may often be 
 right. In such a case the intelligent observer may meet 
 much that fails to satisfy the general requirements of 
 right ; for who is not acute enough to see a great deal 
 in his own surroundings which is really far from being 
 as it ought to be ? But such acuteness is mistaken in 
 
12 INTRODUCTION. [6-7. 
 
 the conceit that, when it examines these objects and 
 pronounces what they ought to be, it is dealing with 
 questions of philosophic science. The object of philo- 
 sophy is the Idea: and the Idea is not so impotent 
 as merely to have a right or an obligation to exist 
 without actually existing. The object of philosophy is 
 an actuality of which those objects, social regulations 
 and conditions, are only the superficial outside. 
 
 7.] Thus reflection — thinking things over— in a 
 general way involves the principle (which also means 
 the beginning) of philosophy. And when the reflective 
 spirit arose again in its independence in modern times, 
 after the epoch of the Lutheran Reformation, it did not, 
 as in its beginnings among the Greeks, stand merely 
 aloof, in a world of its own, but at once turned its 
 energies also upon the apparently illimitable material 
 of the phenomenal world. In this way the name philo- 
 sophy came to be applied to all those branches of know- 
 ledge, which are engaged in ascertaining the standard 
 and Universal in the ocean of empirical individualities, 
 as well as in ascertaining the Necessary element, or 
 Laws, to be found in the apparent disorder of the 
 endless masses of the fortuitous. It thus appears that 
 modern philosophy derives its materials from our own 
 personal observations and perceptions of the external 
 and internal world, from nature as well as from the 
 mind and heart of man, when both stand in the im- 
 mediate presence of the observer. 
 
 This principle of Experience carries with it the un- 
 speakably important condition that, in order to accept 
 and believe any fact, we must be in contact with it ; or, 
 in more exact terms, that we must find the fact united 
 and combined with the certainty of our own selves. 
 We must be in touch with our subject-matter, whether 
 it be by means of our external senses, or, else, by our 
 
7.1 WHAT THE ENGLISH CALL PHILOSOPHY. 13 
 
 profounder mind and our intimate self-consciousness. 
 —This principle is the same as that which has in the 
 present day been termed faith, immediate knowledge, 
 the revelation in the outward world, and, above all, in 
 our own heart. 
 
 Those sciences, which thus got the name of philo- 
 sophy, we call empirical sciences, for the reason that 
 they take their departure from experience. Still the 
 essential results which they aim at and provide, are 
 laws, general propositions, a theory — the thoughts of 
 what is found existing. On this ground the Newtonian 
 physics was called Natural Philosophy. Hugo Grotius, 
 again, by putting together and comparing the behaviour 
 of states towards each other as recorded in history, 
 succeeded, with the help of the ordinary methods of 
 general reasoning, in laying down certain general prin- 
 ciples, and establishing a theory which may be termed 
 the Philosophy of International Law. In England this 
 is still the usual signification of the term philosophy. 
 Newton continues to be celebrated as the greatest of 
 philosophers : and the name goes down as far as the 
 price-lists of instrument-makers. All instruments, such 
 as the thermometer and barometer, which do not come 
 under the special head of magnetic or electric apparatus, 
 are styled philosophical instruments \ Surely thought, 
 and not a mere combination of wood, iron, &c. ought to 
 
 ' The journal, to j, edited by Thomson is called ' Annals of Philo- 
 sophy; or, Magazine of Chemistry, Mineralogy, Mechanics, Natural 
 History, Agriculture, and Arts.' We can easily guess from the title 
 what sort of subjects are here to be understood under the term 
 ' philosophy.' Among the advertisements of books just published, 
 I lately found the following notice in an English newspaper: 'The 
 Art of Preserving the Hair, on Philosophical Principles, neatly 
 printed in post 8vo, price seven shillings.' By philosophical prin- 
 ciples for the pt eser\'ation of the hair are probably meant chemical 
 or physiological principles. 
 
14 INTRODUCTION. [7-8. 
 
 be called the instrument of philosophy ! The recent 
 science of Political Economy in particular, which in 
 Germany is known as Rational Economy of the State, 
 or intelligent national economy, has in England especi- 
 ally appropriated the name of philosophy \ 
 
 8.] In its own field this empirical knowledge may at 
 first give satisfaction ; but in two ways it is seen to 
 come short. In the first place there is another circle 
 of objects which it does not embrace. These are Free- 
 dom, Spirit, and God. They belong to a different 
 sphere, not because it can be said that they have 
 nothing to do with experience ; for though they are 
 certainly not experiences of the senses, it is quite an 
 identical proposition to say that whatever is in con- 
 sciousness is experienced. The real ground for 
 assigning them to another field of cognition is that in 
 their scope and content these objects evidently show 
 themselves as infinite. 
 
 There is an old phrase often wrongly attributed to 
 
 ^ In connexion with the general principles of Political Economy, 
 the term ' philosophical ' is frequently heard from the lips of English 
 statesmen, even in their public speeches. In the House of Commons, 
 on the 2nd Feb. 1825, Brougham, speaking on the address in reply 
 to the speech from the throne, talked of ' the statesman-like and 
 philosophical principles of Free-trade, — for philosophical they un- 
 doubtedly are — upon the acceptance of which his majesty this day 
 congratulated the House.' Nor is this language confined to members 
 of the Opposition. At the shipowners' yearly dinner in the same 
 month, under the chairmanship of the Premier Lord Liverpool, 
 supported by Canning the Secretary of State, and Sir C. Long the 
 Paymaster- General of the Army, Canning in reply to the toast which 
 had been proposed said : 'A period has just begun, in which ministers 
 have it in their power to apply to the administration of this country 
 the sound maxims of a profound philosophy.' Differences there may 
 be between English and German philosophy : still, considering that 
 elsewhere the name of philosophy is used only as a nickname and 
 insult, or as something odious, it is a matter of rejoicing to see it 
 still honoured in the mouth of the English Government. 
 
8-9.] SHORTCOMINGS OF EMPIRICAL SCIENCE. 15 
 
 Aristotle, and supposed to express the general tenor of 
 his philosophy. ' Nihil est in intellectu quod nonfuerit in 
 sensu ' : there is nothing in thought which has not been 
 in sense and experience. If speculative philosophy 
 refused to admit this maxim, it can only have done so 
 from a misunderstanding. It will, however, on the 
 converse side no less assert : ' Nihil est in sensu quod 
 nonfuerit in intellectu.^ And this may be taken in two 
 senses. In the general sense it means that voSs or 
 spirit (the more profound ideaof voC? in modern thought) 
 is the cause of the world. In its special meaning (see 
 § 2) it asserts that the sentiment of right, morals, 
 and religion is a sentiment (and in that way an expe- 
 rience) of such scope and such character that it can 
 spring from and rest upon thought alone. 
 
 9.] But in the second place in point of form the 
 subjective reason desires a further satisfaction than 
 empirical knowledge gives ; and this form, is, in the 
 widest sense of the term, Necessity (§ i). The method 
 of empirical science exhibits two defects. The first is 
 that the Universal or general principle contained in it, 
 the genus, or kind, &c., is, on its own account, indeter- 
 minate and vague, and therefore not on its own account 
 connected with the Particulars or the details. Either 
 is external and accidental to the other ; and it is the 
 same with the particular facts which are brought into 
 union : each is external and accidental to the others. 
 The second defect is that the beginnings are in every 
 case data and postulates, neither accounted for nor 
 deduced. In both these points the form of necessity 
 fails to get its due. Hence reflection, whenever it sets 
 itself to remedy these defects, becomes speculative 
 thinking, the thinking proper to philosophy. As a 
 species of reflection, therefore, which, though it has a 
 certain community of nature with the reflection already 
 
1 6 INTRODUCTION. [9-10. 
 
 mentioned, is nevertheless different from it, philosophic 
 thought thus possesses, in addition to the common 
 forms, some forms of its own, of which the Notion may 
 be taken as the type. 
 
 The relation of speculative science to the other 
 sciences may be stated in the following terms. It does 
 not in the least neglect the empirical facts contained in 
 the several sciences, but recognises and adopts them : 
 it appreciates and applies towards its own structure the 
 universal element in these sciences, their laws and 
 classifications : but besides all this, into the categories 
 of science it introduces, and gives currency to, other 
 categories. The difference, looked at in this way, is 
 only a change of categories. Speculative Logic con- 
 tains all previous Logic and Metaphysics : it preserves 
 the same forms of thought, the same laws and objects, 
 — while at the same time remodelling and expanding 
 them with wider categories. 
 
 From notion in the speculative sense we should dis- 
 tinguish what is ordinarily called a notion. The phrase, 
 that no notion can ever comprehend the Infinite, a 
 phrase which has been repeated over and over again 
 till it has grown axiomatic, is based upon this narrow 
 estimate of what is meant by notions. 
 
 10.] This thought, which is proposed as the instru- 
 ment of philosophic knowledge, itself calls for further 
 explanation. We must understand in what way it pos- 
 sesses necessity or cogency : and when it claims to be 
 equal to the task of apprehending the absolute objects 
 (God, Spirit, Freedom), that claim must be substan- 
 tiated. Such an explanation, however, is itself a lesson 
 in philosophy, and properly falls within the scope of 
 the science itself A preliminary attempt to make 
 matters plain would only be unphilosophical, and con- 
 sist of a tissue of assumptions, assertions, and inferen- 
 
lo.] CRITICISM BEFORE PHILOSOPHY ? 1 7 
 
 tial pros and cons, i. e. of dogmatism without cogenc}', 
 as against which there would be an equal right of 
 counter-dogmatism. 
 
 A main line of argument in the Critical Philosophy 
 bids us pause before proceeding to inquire into God or 
 into the true being of things, and tells us first of all to 
 examine the faculty of cognition and see whether it is 
 equal to such an effort. We ought, says Kant, to 
 become acquainted with the instrument, before we 
 undertake the work for which it is to be employed ; for 
 if the instrument be insufficient, all our trouble will be 
 spent in vain. The plausibility of this suggestion has 
 won for it general assent and admiration ; the result of 
 which has been to withdraw cognition from an interest 
 in its objects and absorption in the study of them, and 
 to direct it back upon itself; and so turn it to a ques- 
 tion of form. Unless we wish to be deceived bywords, 
 it is easy to see what this amounts to. In the case of 
 other instruments, we can try and criticise them jn 
 other ways than by setting about the special work for 
 which they are destined. But the examination of 
 knowledge can only be carried out by an act of know- 
 ledge. To examine this so-called instrument is the 
 same thing as to know it. But to seek to know before 
 we know is as absurd as the wise resolution of Scholas- 
 ticus, not to venture into the water until he had learned 
 to swim. 
 
 Reinhold saw the confusion with which this style of 
 commencement is chargeable, and tried to get out of 
 the difficulty by starting with a hypothetical and proble- 
 matical stage of philosophising. In this way he sup- 
 posed that it would be possible, nobody can tell how, to 
 get along, until we found ourselves, further on, arrived 
 at the primary truth of truths. H is method, when closely 
 looked into, will be seen to be identical with a very 
 
 VOL. II. c 
 
l8 INTRODUCTION. [lo-ii. 
 
 common practice. It starts from a substratum of ex- 
 periential fact, or from a provisional assumption which 
 has been brought into a definition ; and then proceeds 
 to analyse this starting-point. We can detect in Rein- 
 hold's argument a perception of the truth, that the 
 usual course which proceeds by assumptions and antici- 
 pations is no better than a hypothetical and proble- 
 matical mode of procedure. But his perceiving this 
 does not alter the character of this method ; it only 
 makes clear its imperfections. 
 
 11.] The special conditions which call for the exist- 
 ence of philosophy may be thus described. The mind 
 or spirit, when it is sentient or perceptive, finds its 
 object in something sensuous ; when it imagines, in a 
 picture or image ; when it wills, in an aim or end. But 
 in contrast to, or it may be only in distinction from, 
 these forms of its existence and of its objects, the mind 
 has also to gratify the cravings of its highest and most 
 inward life. That innermost self is thought. Thus the 
 mind renders thought its object. In the best meaning 
 of the phrase, it comes to itself; for thought is its prin- 
 ciple, and its very unadulterated self But while thus 
 occupied, thought entangles itself in contradictions, 
 i. e. loses itself in the hard-and-fast non-identity of its 
 thoughts, and so, instead of reaching itself, is caught 
 and held in its counterpart. This result, to which 
 honest but narrow thinking leads the mere under- 
 standing, is resisted by the loftier craving of which we 
 have spoken. That craving expresses the persever- 
 ance of thought, which continues true to itself, even 
 in this conscious loss of its native rest and independ- 
 ence, ' that it may overcome ' and work out in itself the 
 solution of its own contradictions. 
 
 To see that thought in its very nature is dialectical, 
 and that, as understanding, it must fall into contra- 
 
II-I2.] THE PHILOSOPHIC STIMULUS. ig 
 
 diction, — the negative of itself, will form one of the 
 main lessons of logic. When thought grows hopeless 
 of ever achieving, by its own means, the solution of the 
 contradiction which it has by its own action brought 
 upon itself, it turns back to those solutions of the 
 question with which the mind had learned to pacify 
 itself in some of its other modes and forms. Unfor- 
 tunately, however, the retreat of thought has led it, as 
 Plato noticed even in his time, to a very uncalled-for 
 hatred of reason (misology) ; and it then takes up against 
 its own endeavours that hostile attitude of which an 
 example is seen in the doctrine that 'immediate* 
 knowledge, as it is called, is the exclusive form in 
 which we become cognisant of truth. 
 
 12.] The rise of philosophy is due to these cravings 
 of thought. Its point of departure is Experience; in- 
 cluding under that name both our immediate conscious- 
 ness and the inductions from it. Awakened, as it were, 
 by this stimulus, thought is vitally characterised by 
 raising itself above the natural state of mind, above the 
 senses and inferences from the senses into its own 
 unadulterated element, and by assuming, accordingly, 
 at first a stand-aloof and negative attitude towards the 
 point from which it started. Through this state of 
 antagonism to the phenomena of sense its first satis- 
 faction is found in itself, in the Idea of the universal 
 essence of these phenomena : an Idea (the Absolute, 
 or God) which may be more or less abstract. Mean- 
 while, on the other hand, the sciences, based on experi- 
 ence, exert upon the mind a stimulus to overcome the 
 form in which their varied contents are presented, and 
 to elevate these contents to the rank of necessary truth. 
 For the facts of science have the aspect of a vast con- 
 glomerate, one thing coming side by side with another, 
 as if they were merely given and presented, — as in 
 
 C 2 
 
20 INTRODUCTION. [12. 
 
 short devoid of all essential or necessary connexion. 
 In consequence of this stimulus thought is dragged out 
 of its unrealised universality and its fancied or merely 
 possible satisfaction, and impelled onwards to a develop- 
 ment from itself. On one hand this development only 
 means that thought incorporates the contents of science, 
 in all their speciality of detail as submitted. On the 
 other it makes these contents imitate the action of the 
 original creative thought, and present the aspect of a 
 free evolution determined by the logic of the fact alone. 
 On the relation between ' immediacy ' and ' mediation ' 
 in consciousness we shall speak later, expressly and 
 with more detail. Here it may be sufficient to premise 
 that, though the two ' moments ' or factors present them- 
 selves as distinct, still neither of them can be absent, 
 nor can one exist apart from the other. Thus the 
 knowledge of God, as of every supersensible reality, 
 is in its true character an exaltation aboye sensations 
 or perceptions : it consequently involves a negative 
 attitude to the initial data of sense, and to that extent 
 implies mediation. For to mediate is to take some- 
 thing as a beginning and to go onward to a second 
 thing; so that the existence of this second thing de- 
 pends on our having reached it from something else 
 contradistinguished from it. In spite of this, the know- 
 ledge of God is no mere sequel, dependent on the 
 empirical phase of consciousness : in fact, its indepen- 
 dence is essentially secured through this negation and 
 exaltation. — No doubt, if we attach an unfair promin- 
 ence to the fact of mediation, and represent it as imply- 
 ing a state of conditionedness, it may be said — not that 
 the remark would mean much — that philosophy is the 
 child of experience, and owes its rise to a posteriori 
 fact. (As a matter of fact, thinking is always the nega- 
 tion of what we have immediately before us.) With 
 
12.] EXPERIENCE INDISPENSABLE. 21 
 
 as much truth however we may be said to owe eating 
 to the means of nourishment, so long as we can have 
 no eating without them. If we take this view, eating 
 is certainly represented as ungrateful : it devours that 
 to which it owes itself. Thinking, upon this view of 
 its action, is equally ungrateful. 
 
 But there is also an a priori aspect of thought, where 
 by a mediation, not made by anything external but by 
 a reflection into self, we have that immediacy which is 
 universality, the self-complacency of thought which is 
 so much at home with itself that it feels an innate in- 
 difference to descend to particulars, and in that way 
 to the development of its own nature. It is thus also 
 with religion, which, whether it be rude or elaborate, 
 whether it be invested with scientific precision of detail 
 or confined to the simple faith of the heart, possesses, 
 throughout, the same intensive nature of contentment 
 and felicity. But if thought never gets further than the 
 universality of the Ideas, as was perforce the case in the 
 first philosophies (when the Eleatics never got beyond 
 Being, or Heraclitus beyond Becoming), it is justly 
 open to the charge of formalism. Even in a more ad- 
 vanced phase of philosophy, we may often find a doc- 
 trine which has mastered merely certain abstract pro- 
 positions or formulae, such as, ' In the absolute all is 
 one,' 'Subject and object are identical,'— and only re- 
 peating the same thing when it comes to particulars. 
 Bearing in mind this first period of thought, the period 
 of mere generality, we may safely say that experience 
 is the real author o^ growth and advance in philosophy. 
 For, firstly, the empirical sciences do not stop short 
 at the mere observation of the individual features of 
 a phenomenon. By the aid of thought, they are able 
 to meet philosophy with materials prepared for" it, in 
 the shape of general uniformities, i. e. laws, and classi- 
 
22 INTRODUCTION. [12-13. 
 
 fications of the phenomena. When this is done, the 
 particular facts which they contain are ready to be 
 received into philosophy. This, secondly, implies a 
 certain compulsion on thought itself to proceed to these 
 concrete specific truths. The reception into philosophy 
 of these scientific materials, now that thought has re- 
 moved their immediacy and made them cease to be 
 mere data, forms at the same time a development of 
 thought out of itself. Philosophy, then, owes its de- 
 velopment to the empirical sciences. In return it gives 
 their contents what is so vital to them, the freedom of 
 thought, — gives them, in short, an a priori character. 
 These contents are now warranted necessary, and no 
 longer depend on the evidence of facts merely, that 
 they were so found and so experienced. The fact as 
 experienced thus becomes an illustration and a copy 
 of the original and completely self-supporting activity 
 of thought. 
 
 13.] Stated in exact terms, such is the origin and 
 development of philosophy. But the History of Philo- 
 sophy gives us the same process from an historical and 
 external point of view. The stages in the evolution 
 of the Idea there seem to follow each other by accident, 
 and to present merely a number of different and un- 
 connected principles, which the several systems of 
 philosophy carry out in their own way. But it is not 
 so. For these thousands of years the same Architect 
 has directed the work : and that Architect is the one 
 living Mind whose nature is to think, to bring to self- 
 consciousness what it is, and, with its being thus set 
 as object before it, to be at the same time raised above 
 it, and so to reach a higher stage of its own being. 
 The different systems which the history of philosophy 
 presents are therefore not irreconcilable with unity. 
 We may either say, that it is one philosophy at different 
 
13-14.] RELATION OF SUCCESSIVE SYSTEMS. 23 
 
 degrees of maturity : or that the particular principle, 
 which is the groundwork of each system, is but a branch 
 of one and the same universe of thought. In philosophy 
 the latest birth of time is the result of all the systems 
 that have preceded it, and must include their principles ; 
 and so, if, on other grounds, it deserve the title of philo- 
 sophy, will be the fullest, most comprehensive, and most 
 adequate system of all. 
 
 The spectacle of so many and so various systems of 
 philosophy suggests the necessity of defining more 
 exactly the relation of Universal to Particular. When 
 the universal is made a mere form and co-ordinated 
 with the particular, as if it were on the same level, it 
 sinks into a particular itself. Even common sense in 
 every-day matters is above the absurdity of setting a 
 universal beside the particulars. Would any one, who 
 wished for fruit, reject cherries, pears, and grapes, on 
 the ground that they were cherries, pears, or grapes, 
 and not fruit ? But when philosophy is in question, 
 the excuse of many is that philosophies are so different,' 
 and none of them is the philosophy, — that each is only 
 a philosophy. Such a plea is assumed to justify any 
 amount of contempt for philosophy. And yet cherries 
 too are fruit. Often, too, a system, of which the prin- 
 ciple is the universal, is put on a level with another 
 of which the principle is a particular, and with theories 
 which deny the existence of philosophy altogether. 
 Such systems are said to be only different views of 
 philosophy. With equal justice, light and darkness 
 might be styled different kinds of light. 
 
 14.] The same evolution of thought which is exhibited 
 in the history of philosophy is presented in the System 
 of Philosophy itself. Here, instead of surveying the 
 process, as we do in history, from the outside, we see 
 the movement of thought clearly defined in its native 
 
24 INTRODUCTION. [14-15. 
 
 medium. The thought, which is genuine and self-sup- 
 porting, must be intrinsically concrete ; it must be an 
 Idea; and when it is viewed in the whole of its univer- 
 sality, it is the Idea, or the Absolute. The science of 
 this Idea must form a system. For the truth is con- 
 crete ; that is, whilst it gives a bond and principle of 
 unity, it also possesses an internal source of develop- 
 ment. Truth, then, is only possible as a universe or 
 totality of thought ; and the freedom of the whole, as 
 well as the necessity of the several sub-divisions, which 
 it implies, are only possible when these are discrimi- 
 nated and defined. 
 
 Unless it is a system, a philosophy is not a scientific 
 production. Unsystematic philosophising can only be 
 expected to give expression to personal peculiarities 
 of mind, and has no principle for the regulation of its 
 contents. Apart from their interdependence and or- 
 ganic union, the truths of philosophy are valueless, and 
 must then be treated as baseless hypotheses, or personal 
 convictions. Yet many philosophical treatises confine 
 themselves tc ^uch an exposition of the opinions and 
 sentiments of the author. 
 
 The term system is often misunderstood. It does 
 not denote a philosophy, the principle of which is 
 narrow and to be distinguished from others. On the 
 contrary, a genuine philosophy makes it a principle to 
 include every particular principle. 
 
 15.] Each of the parts of philosophy is a philoso- 
 phical whole, a circle rounded and complete in itself. 
 In each of these parts, however, the philosophical Idea 
 is found in a particular specificality or medium. The 
 single circle, because it is a real totality, bursts through 
 the limits imposed by its special medium, and gives 
 rise to a wider circle. The whole of philosophy in 
 this way resembles a circle of circles. The Idea ap- 
 
I5-I6.] AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY. 25 
 
 pears in each single circle, but, at the same time, the 
 whole Idea is constituted by the system of these pecu- 
 liar phases, and each is a necessary member of the 
 organisation. 
 
 16.] In the form of an Encyclopaedia, the science 
 has no room for a detailed exposition of particulars, 
 and must be limited to setting forth the commencement 
 of the special sciences and the notions of cardinal im- 
 portance in them. 
 
 How much of the particular parts is requisite to con- 
 stitute a particular branch of knowledge is so far inde- 
 terminate, that the part, if it is to be something true, 
 must be not an isolated member merely, but itself an 
 organic whole. The entire field of philosophy therefore 
 really forms a single science ; but it may also be viewed 
 as a total, composed of several particular sciences. 
 
 The encyclopaedia of philosophy must not be con- 
 founded with ordinary encyclopaedias. An ordinary 
 encyclopaedia does not pretend to be more than an 
 aggregation of sciences, regulated by no principle, and 
 merely as experience offers them. Sometimes it even 
 includes what merely bear the name of sciences, while 
 they are nothing more than a collection of bits of 
 information. In an aggregate like this, the several 
 branches of knowledge owe their place in the ency- 
 clopaedia to extrinsic reasons, and their unity is there- 
 fore artificial : they are arranged, but we cannot say 
 they form a system. For the same reason, especially 
 as the materials to be combined also depend upon no 
 one rule or principle, the arrangement is at best an 
 experiment, and will always exhibit inequalities. 
 
 An encyclopaedia of philosophy excludes three kinds 
 of partial science. I. It excludes mere aggregates of 
 bits of information. Philology in its prima facie aspect 
 belongs to this class. II. It rejects the quasi-sciences, 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 which are founded on an act of arbitrary will alone, 
 such as Heraldry. Sciences of this class are positive 
 from beginning to end. III. In another class of 
 sciences, also styled positive, but which have a rational 
 basis and a rational beginning, philosophy claims that 
 constituent as its own. The positive features remain 
 the property of the sciences themselves. 
 
 The positive element in the last class oi sciences is 
 of different sorts. (I) Their commencement, though 
 rational at bottom, yields to the influence of fortuitous- 
 ness, when they have to bring their universal truth into 
 contact with actual facts and the single phenomena of 
 experience. In this region of chance and change, the 
 adequate notion of science must yield its place to 
 reasons or grounds of explanation. Thus, e.g. in the 
 science of jurisprudence, or in the system of direct 
 and indirect taxation, it is necessary to have certain 
 points precisely and definitively settled which lie be- 
 yond the competence of the absolute lines laid down 
 by the pure notion. A certain latitude of settlement 
 accordingly is left : and each point may be determined 
 in one way on one principle, in another way on another, 
 and admits of no definitive certainty. Similarly the 
 Idea of Nature, when parcelled out in detail, is dissi- 
 pated into contingencies. Natural history, geography, 
 and medicine stumble upon descriptions of existence, 
 upon kinds and distinctions, which are not determined by 
 reason, but by sport and adventitious incidents. Even 
 history comes under the same category. The Idea is 
 its essence and inner nature ; but, as it appears, every- 
 thing is under contingency and in the field of voluntary 
 action. (II) These sciences are positive also in failing 
 to recognise the finite nature of what they predicate, 
 and to point out how these categories and their whole 
 sphere pass into a higher. They assume their state- 
 
I6-I7.] POSITIVE ELEMENTS IN THE SCIENCES. 27 
 
 merits to possess an authority beyond appeal. Here 
 the fault lies in the finitude of the form, as in the pre- 
 vious instance it lay in th^ matter. (Ill) In close 
 sequel to this, sciences are positive in consequence of 
 the inadequate grounds on which their conclusions 
 rest : based as these are on detached and casual infer- 
 ence, upon feeling, faith, and authority, and, generally 
 speaking, upon the deliverances of inward and outward 
 perception. Under this head we must also class the 
 philosophy which proposes to build upon 'anthropo- 
 logy,' facts of consciousness, inward sense, or outward 
 experience. It may happen, however, that empirical is 
 an epithet applicable only to the form of scientific ex- 
 position ; whilst intuitive sagacity has arranged what 
 are mere phenomena, according to the essential se- 
 quence of the notion. In such a case the contrasts 
 between the varied and numerous phenomena brought 
 together serve to eliminate the external and accidental 
 circumstances of their conditions, and the universal 
 thus comes clearly into view. Guided by such an in- 
 tuition, experimental physics will present the rational 
 science of Nature,— as history will present the science 
 of human affairs and actions — in an external picture, 
 which mirrors the philosophic notion. 
 
 17.] It may seem as if philosophy, in order to start 
 on its course, had, like the rest of the sciences, to begin 
 with a subjective presupposition. The sciences postu- 
 late their respective objects, such as space, number, or 
 whatever it be ; and it might be supposed that philo- 
 sophy had also to postulate the existence of thought. 
 But the two cases are not exactly parallel. It is by 
 the free act of thought that it occupies a point of view, 
 in which it is for its own self, and thus gives itself an 
 object of its own production. Nor is this all. The 
 very point of view, which originally is taken on its 
 
28 INTRODUCTION. [17-18. 
 
 own evidence only, must in the course of the science 
 be converted to a result, — the ultimate result in which 
 philosophy returns into itself and reaches the point 
 with which it began. In this manner philosophy ex- 
 hibits the appearance of a circle which closes with 
 itself, and has no beginning in the same way as the 
 other sciences have. To speak of a beginning of philo- 
 sophy has a meaning only in relation to a person who 
 proposes to commence the study, and not in relation 
 to the science as science. The same thing may be thus 
 expressed. The notion of science— the notion therefore 
 with which we start — which, for the very reason that it 
 is initial, impMes a separation between the thought which 
 is our object, and the subject philosophising which is, 
 as it were, external to the former, must be grasped and 
 comprehended by the science itself. This is in short 
 the one single aim, action, and goal of philosophy — to 
 arrive at the notion of its notion, and thus secure its 
 return and its satisfaction. 
 
 18.] As the whole science, and only the whole, can 
 exhibit what the Idea or system of reason is, it is im- 
 possible to give in a preliminary way a general impres- 
 sion of a philosophy. Nor can a division of philosophy 
 into its parts be intelligible, except in connexion with 
 the system. A preliminary division, like the limited con- 
 ception from which it comes, can only be an anticipation. 
 Here however it is premised that the Idea turns out to 
 be the thought which is completely identical with itself, 
 and not identical simply in the abstract, but also in its 
 action of setting itself over against itself, so as to gain 
 a being of its own, and yet of being in full possession of 
 itself while it is in this other. Thus philosophy is sub- 
 divided into three parts : 
 
 I. Logic, the science of the Idea in and for 
 itself. 
 
i8.] PHILOSOPHY, HOW TRIPARTITE. 29 
 
 II. The Philosophy of Nature: the science of the 
 Idea in its otherness. 
 
 III. The Philosophy of Mind: the science of the 
 Idea come back to itself out of that otherness. 
 
 As observed in § 15, the differences between the 
 several philosophical sciences are only aspects or 
 specialisations of the one Idea or system of reason, 
 which and which alone is alike exhibited in these 
 different media. In Nature nothing else would have to 
 be discerned, except the Idea: but the Idea has here 
 divested itself of its proper being. In Mind, again, the 
 Idea has asserted a being of its own, and is on the way 
 to become absolute. Every such form in which the Idea 
 is expressed, is at the same time a passing or fleeting 
 stage : and hence each of these subdivisions has not 
 only to know its contents as an object which has being 
 for the time, but also in the same act to expound how 
 these contents pass into their higher circle. To repre- 
 sent the relation between them as a division, therefore, 
 leads to misconception ; for it co-ordinates the several 
 parts or sciences one beside another, as if they had no 
 innate development, but were, like so many species, 
 really and radically distinct. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 PRELIMINARY NOTION. 
 
 19.] Logic is the science of the pure Idea; pure, 
 that is, because the Idea is in the abstract medium of 
 Thought, 
 
 This definition, and the others which occur in these 
 introductory outhnes, are derived from a survey of the 
 whole system, to which accordingly they are subsequent. 
 The same remark applies to all prefatory notions what- 
 ever about philosophy. 
 
 Logic might have been defined as the science of 
 thought, and of its laws and characteristic forms. But 
 thought, as thought, constitutes only the general medium, 
 or qualifying circumstance, which renders the Idea dis- 
 tinctively logical. If we identify the Idea with thought, 
 thought must not be taken in the sense of a method or 
 form, but in the sense of the self-developing totality of 
 its laws and peculiar terms. These laws are the work 
 of thought itself, and not a fact which it finds and must 
 submit to. 
 
 From different points of view. Logic is either the 
 hardest or the easiest of the sciences. Logic is hard, 
 because it has to deal not with perceptions, nor, like 
 geometry, with abstract representations of the senses, 
 but with pure abstractions; and because it demands 
 a force and facility of withdrawing into pure thought, of 
 keeping firm hold on it, and of moving in such an 
 
ip.] LOGIC DEFINED. 3I 
 
 element. Logic is easy, because its facts are nothing 
 but our own thought and its familiar forms or terms : 
 and these are the acme of simplicity, the a b c of every- 
 thing else. They are also what we are best acquainted 
 with: such as, 'Is' and 'Is not': quality and magni- 
 tude : being potential and being actual : one, man}-, and 
 so on. But such an acquaintance only adds to the 
 difficulties of the study; for while, on the one hand, we 
 naturally think it is not worth our trouble to occupy 
 ourselves any longer with things so familiar, on the 
 other hand, the problem is to become acquainted with 
 them in a new way, quite opposite to that in which 
 we know them already. 
 
 The utility of Logic is a matter which concerns its 
 bearings upon the student, and the training it may give 
 for other purposes. This logical training consists in 
 the exercise in thinking which the student has to go 
 through (this science is the thinking of thinking) : and 
 in the fact that he stores his head with thoughts, in their 
 native unalloyed character. It is true that Logic, being 
 the absolute form of truth, and another name for the 
 very truth itself, is something more than merely useful. 
 Yet if what is noblest, most liberal and most indepen- 
 dent is also most useful, Logic has some claim to the 
 latter character. Its utility must then be estimated at 
 another rate than exercise in thought for the sake of the 
 exercise. 
 
 (l) The first question is: What is the object of our 
 science ? The simplest and most intelligible answer to this 
 question is that Truth is the object of Logic. Truth is a 
 noble word, and the thing is nobler still. So long as man 
 is sound at heart and in spirit, the search for truth must 
 awake all the enthusiasm of his nature. But immediately 
 there steps in the objection- Are we able to know truth? 
 There seems to be a disproportion between finite beings 
 like ourselves and the truth which is absolute : and doubts 
 
32 PRELIMINARY NOTION. [19. 
 
 suggest themselves whether there is any bridge between 
 the finite and the infinite. God is truth : how shall we know 
 Him ? Such an undertaking appears to stand in contra- 
 diction with the graces of lowliness and humihty. — Others 
 who ask whether we can know the truth have a different 
 purpose. They want to justify themselves in living on 
 contented with their petty, finite aims. And humility of 
 this stamp is a poor thing. 
 
 But the time is past when people asked : How shall I, a 
 poor worm of the dust, be able to know the truth ? And in 
 its stead we find vanity and conceit : people claim, without 
 any trouble on their part, to breathe the very atmosphere of 
 truth. The young have been flattered into the belief that 
 they possess a natural birthright of moral and religious 
 truth. And in the same strain, those of riper years are 
 declared to be sunk, petrified, ossified in falsehood. Youth, 
 say these teachers, sees the bright fight of dawn : but the 
 older generation Hes in the slough and mire of the common 
 day. They admit that the special sciences are something 
 that certainly ought to be cultivated, but merely as the 
 means to satisfy the needs of outer life. In all this it is not 
 humility which holds back from the knowledge and study 
 of the truth, but a conviction that we are already in full 
 possession of it. And no doubt the young carry with them 
 the hopes of their elder compeers ; on them rests the ad- 
 vance of the world and science. But these hopes are set 
 upon the young, only on the condition that, instead of re- 
 maining as they are, they undertake the stern labour of 
 mind. 
 
 This modesty in truth-seeking has still another phase : 
 and that is the genteel indifference to truth, as we see it in 
 Pilate's conversation with Christ. Pilate asked 'What is 
 truth ? ' with the air of a man who had settled accounts with 
 everything long ago, and concluded that nothing particularly 
 matters : — he meant much the same as Solomon when he 
 says : ' All is vanity.' When it comes to this, nothing is 
 left but self-conceit. 
 
 The knowledge of the truth meets an additional obstacle 
 in timidity. A slothful mind finds it natural to say : ' Don't 
 
X9.] LOGIC — THE QUEST OF TRUTH. 33 
 
 let it be supposed that we mean to be in earnest with our 
 philosophy. We shall be glad inter alia to study Logic : but 
 Logic must be sure to leave us as we were before.' People 
 have a feeling that, if thinking passes the ordinary range of 
 our ideas and impressions, it cannot but be on the evil road. 
 They seem to be trusting themselves to a sea on which they 
 will be tossed to and fro by the waves of thought, till at 
 length they again reach the sandbank of this temppral 
 scene, as utterly poor as when they left it. What comes of 
 such a view, we see in the world. It is possible within these 
 limits to gain varied information and many accomplishments, 
 to become a master of official routine, and to be trained for 
 special purposes. But it is quite another thing to educate 
 the spirit for the higher life and to devote our energies to 
 its service. In our own day it may be hoped a longing for 
 sorhething better has sprung up among the young, so that 
 they will not be contented with the mere straw of outer 
 knowledge. 
 
 (2) It is universally agreed that thought is the object of 
 Logic. But of thought our estimate may be very mean, or 
 it may be very high. On one hand, people say : ' It is only 
 a thought.' In their view thought is subjective, arbitrary 
 and accidental— distinguished from the thing itself, from the 
 true and the real. On the other hand, a very high estimate 
 may be formed of thought ; when thought alone is held 
 adequate to attain the highest of all things, the nature of 
 God, of which the senses can tell us nothing. God is a 
 spirit, it is said, and must be worshipped in spirit and in 
 truth. But the merely felt and sensible, we admit, is not the 
 spiritual ; its heart of hearts is in thought ; and only spirit 
 can know spirit. And though it is true that spirit can de- 
 mean itself as feeling and sense— as is the case in religion, 
 the mere feeling, as a mode of consciousness, is one thing, 
 and its contents another. Feeling, as feeling, is the general 
 form of the sensuous nature which we have in common 
 with the brutes. This form, viz. feeling, may possibly seize 
 and appropriate the full organic truth : but the form has no 
 real congruity with its contents. The form of feeling is the 
 lowest in which spiritual truth can be expressed. The 
 
 VOL. II. D 
 
34 PRELIMINARY NOTION. [19. 
 
 world of spiritual existences, God himself, exists in proper 
 truth, only in thought and as thought. If this be so, there- 
 fore, thought, far from being a mere thought, is the highest 
 and, in strict accuracy, the sole mode of apprehending the 
 eternal and absolute. 
 
 As of thought, so also of the science of thought, a very 
 high or a very low opinion may be formed. Any man, it is 
 supposed, can think without Logic, as he can digest without 
 studying physiology. If he have studied Logic, he thinks 
 afterwards as he did before, perhaps more methodically, but 
 with little alteration. If this were all, and if Logic did no 
 more than make men acquainted with the action of thought 
 as the faculty of comparison and classification, it would 
 produce nothing which had not been done quite as well 
 before- And in point of fact Logic hitherto had no other 
 idea of its duty than this. Yet to be well-informed about 
 thought, even as a mere activity of the subject-mind, is 
 honourable and interesting for man. It is in knowing what 
 he is and what he does, that man is distinguished from the 
 brutes. But we may take the higher estimate of thought— 
 as what alone can get really in touch with the supreme and 
 true. In that case, Logic as the science of thought occupies 
 a high ground. If the science of Logic then considers 
 thought in its action and its productions (and thought being 
 no resultless energy produces thoughts and the particular 
 tliought required), the theme of Logic is in general the 
 supersensible world, and to deal with that theme is to dwell 
 for a while in that world. Mathematics is concerned with 
 the abstractions of time and space. But these are still the 
 object of sense, although the sensible is abstrr.ct and 
 idealised. Thought bids adieu even to this last and abstract 
 sensible : it asserts its own native independence, renounces 
 the field of the external and internal sense, and puts away 
 the interests and inclinations of the individual. When Logic 
 takes this ground, it is a higher science than we are in the 
 habit of supposing. 
 
 (3) The necessity of understanding Logic in a deeper 
 sense than as the science of the mere form of thought is 
 enforced by the interests of religion and politics, of law and 
 
i9-ao.] LOGIC — THE SCIENCE OF THOUGHT. 35 
 
 morality. In earlier days men meant no harm by thinking : 
 they thought away freely and fearlessly. They thought 
 about God, about Nature, and the State ; and they felt sure 
 that a knowledge of the truth was obtainable through thought 
 only, and not through the senses or any random ideas or 
 opinions. But while they so thought, the principal ordi- 
 nances of life began to be seriously affected by their con- 
 clusions. Thought deprived existing institutions of their 
 force. Constitutions fell a victim to thought : religion was 
 assailed by thought: firm religious beliefs which had been 
 always looked upon as revelations were undermined, and in 
 many minds the old faith was upset. The Greek philo- 
 sophers, for example, became antagonists of the old religion, 
 and destroyed its beliefs. Philosophers were accordingly 
 banished or put to death, as revolutionists who had sub- 
 verted religion and the state, two things which were in- 
 separable. Thought, in short, made itself a power in the 
 real world, and exercised enormous ir luence. The matter 
 ended by drawing attention to the influence of thought, and 
 its claims were submitted to a more rigorous scrutiny, by 
 which the world professed to find that thought arrogated too 
 much and was unable to perform what it had undertaken. 
 It had not— people said— learned the real being of God, of 
 Nature and Mind. It had not learned what the truth was. 
 What it had done, was to overthrow religion and the state. 
 It became urgent therefore to justify thought, with reference 
 to the results it had produced : and it is this examination 
 into the nature of thought and this justification which in 
 recent times has constituted one of the main problems of 
 philosophy. 
 
 20.] If we take our prima facie impression of 
 thought, we find on examination first {a) that, in its 
 usual subjective acceptation, thought is one out of many 
 activities or faculties of the mind, co-ordinate with such 
 others as sensation, perception, imagination, desire, 
 volition, and the like. The product of this activity, the 
 form or character peculiar to thought, is the universal, 
 or, in general, the abstract. Thought, regarded as an 
 
 D2 
 
36 PRELIMINARY NOTION. [20. 
 
 activity, may be accordingly described as the active uni- 
 versal, and, since the deed, its product, is the universal 
 once more, may be called a self-actualising universal. 
 Thought conceived as a subject (agent) is a thinker, and 
 the subject existing as a thinker is simply denoted by 
 the term ' I.' 
 
 The propositions giving an account of thought in this 
 and the following sections are not offered as assertions 
 or opinions of mine on the matter. But in these pre- 
 liminary chapters any deduction or proof would be 
 impossible, and the statements may be taken as matters 
 in evidence. In other words, every man, when he 
 thinks and considers his thoughts, will discover by the 
 experience of his consciousness that they possess the 
 character of universality as well as the other aspects of 
 thought to be afterwards enumerated. We assume of 
 course that his powers of attention and abstraction have 
 undergone a previous training, enabling him to observe 
 correctly the evidence of his consciousness and his con- 
 ceptions. 
 
 This introductory exposition has already alluded to 
 the distinction between Sense, Conception, and Thought. 
 As the distinction is of capital importance for under- 
 standing the nature and kinds of knowledge, it will 
 help to explain matters if we here call attention to it. 
 For the explanation of Sense, the readiest method cer- 
 tainly is, to refer to its external source— the organs of 
 sense. But to name the organ does not help much to 
 explain what is apprehended by it. The real distinction 
 between sense and thought lies in this — that the essen- 
 tial feature of the sensible is individuality, and as the 
 individual (which, reduced to its simplest terms, is the 
 atom) is also a member of a group, sensible existence 
 presents a number of mutually exclusive units, — of 
 units, to speak in more definite and abstract formulae. 
 
2o.j SENSE, CONCEPTION, THOUGHT. 37 
 
 which exist side by side with, and after, one another. 
 Conception or picture-thinking works with materials 
 from the same sensuous source. But these materials 
 when conceived are expressly characterised as in me and 
 therefore mine : and secondly, as universal, or simple, 
 because only referred to self. Nor is sense the only 
 source of materialised conception. There are concep- 
 tions constituted by materials emanating from self con- 
 scious thought, such as those of law, morality, religion, 
 and even of thought itself, and it requires some effort 
 to detect wherein lies the difference between such con- 
 ceptions and thoughts having the same import. For it 
 is a thought of which such conception is the vehicle, and 
 there is no want of the form of universahty, without 
 which no content could be in me, or be a conception at 
 all. Yet here also the peculiarity of conception is, 
 generally speaking, to be sought in the individualism or 
 isolation of its contents. True it is that, for example, 
 law and legal provisions do not exist in a sensible 
 space, mutually excluding one another. Nor as regards 
 time, though they appear to some extent in succession, 
 are their contents themselves conceived as affected by 
 time, or as transient and changeable in it. The fault in 
 conception lies deeper. These ideas, though implicitly 
 possessing the organic unity of mind, stand isolated 
 here and there on the broad ground of conception, with 
 its inward and abstract generality. Thus cut adrift, 
 each is simple, unrelated : Right, Duty, God. Concep- 
 tion in these circumstances either rests satisfied with 
 declaring that Right is Right, God is God : or in a 
 higher grade of culture, it proceeds to enunciate the 
 attributes; as, for instance, God is the Creator of the 
 world, omniscient, almighty, &c. In this way several 
 isolated, simple predicates are strung together : but in 
 spite of the link supplied by their subject, the predicates 
 
38 PRELIMINARY NOTION. [ao. 
 
 never get beyond mere contiguity. In this point Con- 
 ception coincides with Understanding : the only distinc- 
 tion being that the latter introduces relations of universal 
 and particular, of cause and effect, &c., and in this way 
 supplies a necessary connexion to the isolated ideas of 
 conception ; which last has left them side by side in its 
 vague mental spaces, connected only by a bare ' and.' 
 
 The difference between conception and thought is of 
 special importance : because philosophy may be said to 
 do nothing but transform conceptions into thoughts, — 
 though it works the further transformation of a mere 
 thought into a notion. 
 
 Sensible existence has been characterised by the 
 attributes of individuality and mutual exclusion of the 
 members. It is well to remember that these very attri- 
 butes of sense are thoughts and general terms. It will 
 be shown in the Logic that thought (and the universal) 
 is not a mere opposite of sense : it lets nothing escape 
 it, but, outflanking its other, is at once that other and 
 itself. Now language is the work of thought : and 
 hence all that is expressed in language must be uni- 
 versal. What I only mean or suppose is mine : it 
 belongs to me, — this particular individual. But language 
 expresses nothing but universality; and so I cannot say 
 what I merely mean. And the unutterable, — feeling or 
 sensation, — far from being the highest truth, is the most 
 unimportant and untrue. If I say 'The individual/ 
 'This individual,' 'here,' 'now,' all these are universal 
 terms. Everything and anything is an individual, a 
 ' this,' and if it be sensible, is here and now. Similarly 
 when I say, ' I,' I mean my single self to the exclusion 
 of all others : but what I say, viz. ' I,' is just every 'I,* 
 which in like manner excludes all others from itself. In 
 an awkward expression which Kant used, he said that I 
 accompany all my conceptions, — sensations, too, desires, 
 
30.] SUBJECTIVE THOUGHT AND FORMAL LOGIC. 39 
 
 actions, &c. 'I * is in essence and act the universal : 
 and such partnership is a form, though an external 
 form, of universality. All other men have it in common 
 with me to be ' I ' : just as it is common to all my sen- 
 sations and conceptions to be mine. But * I,' in the 
 abstract, as such, is the mere act of self-concentration 
 or self relation, in which we make abstraction from all 
 conception and feeling, from every state of mind and 
 every peculiarity of nature, talent, and experience. To 
 this extent, ' I ' is the existence of a wholly abstract 
 universality, a principle of abstract freedom. Hence 
 thought, viewed as a subject, is what is expressed by 
 the word ' I ' : and since I am at the same time in all my 
 sensations, conceptions, and states of consciousness, 
 thought is everywhere present, and is a category that 
 runs through all these modifications. 
 
 Our first impression when we use the term thought is of 
 a subjective activity — one amongst many similar faculties, 
 such as memory, imagination and will. Were thought 
 merely an activity of the subject-mind and treated under 
 that aspect by logic, logic would resemble the other sciences 
 in possessing a well-marked object. It might in that case 
 seem arbitrary to devote a special science to thought, whilst 
 will, imagination and the rest were denied the same privilege. 
 The selection of one faculty however might even in this view 
 be very well grounded on a certain authority acknowledged 
 to belong to thought, and on its claim to be regarded as the 
 true nature of man, in which consists his distinction from the 
 brutes. Nor is it unimportant to study thought even as a 
 subjective energy. A detailed analysis of its nature would 
 exhibit rules and laws, a knowledge of which is derived 
 from experience. A treatment of the laws of thought, from 
 this point of view, used once to form the body of logical 
 science. Of that science Aristotle was the founder. He 
 succeeded in assigning to thought what properly belongs to 
 it. Our thought is extremely concrete : but in its composite 
 contents we must distinguish the part that properly belongs 
 
40 PRELIMINARY NOTION. [20. 
 
 to thought, or to the abstract mode of its action. A subtle 
 spiritual bond, consisting in the agency of thought, is what 
 gives unity to all these contents, and it was this bond, the 
 form as form, that Aristotle noted and described. Up to the 
 present day, the logic of Aristotle continues to be the re- 
 ceived system. It has indeed been spun out to greater 
 length, especially by the labours of the medieval Schoolmen 
 who, without making any material additions, merely refined 
 in details. The moderns also have left their mark upon this 
 logic, partly by omitting many points of logical doctrine due 
 to Aristotle and the Schoolmen, and partly by foisting in a 
 quantity of psychological matter. The purport of the science 
 is to become acquainted with the procedure of finite thought : 
 and, if it is adapted to its pre-supposed object, the science is 
 entitled to be styled correct. The study of this formal logic 
 undoubtedly has its uses. It sharpens the wits, as the phrase 
 goes, and teaches us to collect our thoughts and to abstract 
 — whereas in common consciousness we have to deal with 
 sensuous conceptions which cross and perplex one another. 
 Abstraction moreover implies the concentration of the mind 
 on a single point, and thus induces the habit of attending to 
 our inward selves. An acquaintance with the forms of 
 finite thought may be made a means of training the mind 
 for the empirical sciences, since their method is regulated by 
 these forms : and in this sense logic has been designated 
 Instrumental. It is true, we may be still more liberal, and 
 say : Logic is to be studied not for its utility, but for its own 
 sake ; the super-excellent is not to be sought for the sake of 
 mere utility. In one sense this is quite correct : but it may 
 be replied that the super-excellent is also the most useful : 
 because it is the all-sustaining principle which, having a 
 subsistence of its own, may therefore serve as the vehicle of 
 special ends which it furthers and secures. And thus, 
 special ends, though they have no right to be set first, are 
 still fostered by the presence of the highest good. Religion, 
 for instance, has an absolute value of its own ; yet at the 
 same time other ends flourish and succeed in its train. As 
 Christ says : ' Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all 
 these things shall be added unto you.' Particular ends can 
 
20-2I.] THE UNIVERSAL AS THOUGHT-PRODUCT. 4I 
 
 be attained only in the attainment of what absolutely is and 
 exists in its own right. 
 
 21.] {b) Thought was described as active. We now, 
 in the second place, consider this action in its bearings 
 upon objects, or as reflection upon something. In 
 this case the universal or product of its operation con- 
 tains the value of the thing— is the essential, inward, and 
 true. 
 
 In § 5 the old belief was quoted that the reality in 
 object, circumstance, or event, the intrinsic worth or 
 essence, the thing on which everything depends, is not 
 a self-evident datum of consciousness, or coincident with 
 the first appearance and impression of the object ; that, 
 on the contrary, Reflection is required in order to dis- 
 cover the real constitution of the object — and that by 
 such reflection it will be ascertained. 
 
 To reflect is a lesson which even the child has to learn. 
 One of his first lessons is to join adjectives with substantives. 
 This obliges him to attend and distinguish : he has to re- 
 member a rule and apply it to the particular case. This rule 
 is nothing but a universal : and the child must see that the 
 particular adapts itself to this universal. In life, again, we 
 have ends to attain. And with regard to these we ponder 
 which is the best way to secure them. The end here re- 
 presents the universal or governing principle : and we have 
 means and instruments whose action we regulate in con- 
 formity to the end. In the same way reflection is active in 
 questions of conduct. To reflect here means to recollect the 
 right, the duty, — the universal which serves as a fixed rule 
 to guide our behaviour in the given case. Our particular 
 act must imply and recognise the universal law. — We find 
 the same thing exhibited in our study of natural phenomena. 
 For instance, we observe thunder and lightning. The 
 phenomenon is a familiar one, and we often perceive it. 
 But man is not content with a bare acquaintance, or with 
 the fact as it appears to the senses ; he. would like to get 
 behind the surface, to know what it is, and to comprehend 
 
42 PRELIMINARY NOTION. [ai. 
 
 it. This leads him to reflect : he seeks to find out the cause 
 as something distinct from the mere phenomenon : he tries 
 to know the inside in its distinction from the outside. Hence 
 the phenomenon becomes double, it splits into inside and 
 outside, into force and its manifestation, into cause and 
 effect. Once more we find the inside or the force identified 
 with the universal and permanent : not this or that flash of 
 lightning, this or that plant— but that which continues the 
 same in them all. The sensible appearance is individual 
 and evanescent: the permanent in it is discovered by 
 reflection. Nature shows us a countless number of indi- 
 vidual forms and phenomena. Into this variety we feel a 
 need of introducing unity : we compare, consequently, and 
 try to find the universal of each single case. Individuals are 
 born and perish : the species abides and recurs in them all : 
 and its existence is only visible to reflection. Under the 
 same head fall such laws as those regulating the motion of 
 the heavenly bodies. To-day we see the stars here, and to- 
 morrow there : and our mind finds something incongruous 
 in this chaos — something in which it can put no faith, be- 
 cause it believes in order and in a simple, constant, and 
 universal law. Inspired by this belief, the mind has directed 
 its reflection towards the phenomena, and learnt their laws. 
 In other words, it has established the movement of the 
 heavenly bodies to be in accordance with a universal law 
 from which every change of position may be known and 
 predicted. — The case is the same with the influences which 
 make themselves felt in the infinite complexity of human 
 conduct. There, too, man has the belief in the sway of 
 a general principle. — From all these examples it may be 
 gathered how reflection is always seeking for something 
 fixed and permanent, definite in itself and governing the 
 particulars. This universal which cannot be apprehended 
 by the senses counts as the true and essential. Thus, duties 
 and rights are all-important in the matter of conduct: and 
 an action is true when it conforms to those universal 
 formulae. 
 
 In thus characterising the universal, we become aware of 
 its antithesis to something else. This something else is the 
 
at-22.] THE UNIVERSAL AS ESSENCE OF THINGS. 43 
 
 merely immediate, outward and individual, as opposed to 
 the mediate, inward and universal. The universal does not 
 exist externally to the outward eye as a universal. The kind 
 as kind cannot be perceived : the laws of the celestial motions 
 are not written on the sky. The universal is neither seen 
 nor heard, its existence is only for the mind. Religion leads 
 us to a universal, which embraces all else within itself, to an 
 Absolute by which all else is brought into being: and this 
 Absolute is an object not of the senses but of the mind and 
 of thought. 
 
 22.] (c) By the act of reflection something is altered 
 in the way in which the fact was originally presented 
 in sensation, perception, or conception. Thus, as it 
 appears, an alteration of the object must be interposed 
 before its true nature can be discovered. 
 
 What reflection elicits, is a product of our thought. Solon, 
 for instance, produced out of his head the laws he gave to 
 the Athenians. This is half of the truth: but we must not 
 on that account forget that the universal (in Solon's case, 
 the laws) is the very reversr of merely subjective, or fail to 
 note that it is the essential, true, and objective being of 
 things. To discover the truth in things, mere attention is 
 not enough ; we must call in the action of our own faculties 
 to transform what is immediately before us. Now, at first 
 sight, this seems an inversion of the natural order, calculated 
 to thwart the very purpose on which knowledge is bent. 
 But the method is not so irrational as it seems. It has been 
 the conviction of every age that the only way of reaching the 
 permanent substratum was to transmute the given pheno- 
 menon by means of reflection. In modern times a doubt 
 has for the first time been raised on this point in connexion 
 with the difference alleged to exist between the products of 
 our thought and the things in their own nature. This real 
 nature of things, it is said, is very different from what we 
 make out of them. The divorce between thought and thing 
 is mainly the work of the Critical Philosophy, and runs 
 counter to the conviction of all previous ages, that their 
 agreement was a matter of course. The antithesis between 
 
44 PRELIMINARY NOTION. [22-23. 
 
 them is the hinge on which modern philosophy turns. 
 Meanwhile the natural belief of men gives the lie to it. In 
 common life we reflect, without particularly reminding our- 
 selves that this is the process of arriving at the truth, and we 
 think without hesitation, and in the firm beUef that thought 
 coincides with thing. And this belief is of the greatest 
 importance. It marks the diseased state of the age when we 
 see it adopt the despairing creed that our knowledge is only 
 subjective, and that beyond this subjective we cannot go. 
 Whereas, rightly understood, truth is objective, and ought 
 so to regulate the conviction of every one, that the conviction 
 of the individual is stamped as wrong when it does not agree 
 with this rule. Modern views, on the contrary, put great 
 value on the mere fact of conviction, and hold that to be 
 convinced is good for its own sake, whatever be the burden 
 of our conviction, — there being no standard by which we 
 can measure its truth. 
 
 We said above that, according to the old belief, it was the 
 characteristic right of the mind to know the truth. If this 
 be so, it also implies that everything we know both of out- 
 ward and inward nature, in one word, the objective world, 
 is in its own self the same as it is in thought, and that to 
 think is to bring out the truth of our object, be it what it 
 may. The business of philosophy is only to bring into 
 explicit consciousness what the world in all ages has 
 believed about thought. Philosophy therefore advances 
 nothing new; and our present discussion has led us to a 
 conclusion which agrees with the natural belief of mankind. 
 
 23.] [d) The real nature of the object is brought to 
 Hght in reflection ; but it is no less true that this exer- 
 tion of thought is my act. If this be so, the real nature 
 is a product of my mind, in its character of thinking 
 subject— generated by me in my simple universality, 
 self-collected and removed from extraneous influences, 
 — in one word, in my Freedom. 
 
 Think for yourself, is a phrase which people often 
 use as if it had some special significance. The fact 
 
23-24-] LOGIC IDENTIFIED WITH METAPHYSICS. 45 
 
 is, no man can think for another, any more than he can 
 eat or drink for him : and the expression is a pleonasm. 
 To think is in fact ipso facto to be free, for thought as 
 the action of the universal is an abstract relating of 
 self to self, where, being at home with ourselves, and 
 as regards our subjectivity, utterly blank, our con- 
 sciousness is, in the matter of its contents, only in the 
 fact and its characteristics. If this be admitted, and 
 if we apply the term humility or modesty to an attitude 
 where our subjectivity is not allowed to interfere by 
 act or quality, it is easy to appreciate the question 
 touching the humility or modesty and pride of philo- 
 sophy. For in point of contents, thought is only true 
 in proportion as it sinks itself in the facts ; and in point 
 of form it is no private or particular state or act of 
 the subject, but rather that attitude of consciousness 
 where the abstract self, freed from all the special limi- 
 tations to which its ordinary states or qualities are 
 liable, restricts itself to that universal action in which 
 it is identical with all individuals. In these circum- 
 stances philosophy may be acquitted of the charge of 
 pride. And when Aristotle summons the mind to rise 
 to the dignity of that attitude, the dignity he seeks is 
 won by letting slip all our individual opinions and pre- 
 judices, and submitting to the sway of the fact. 
 
 24.] With these explanations and qualifications, 
 thoughts may be termed Objective Thoughts, — among 
 which are also to be included the forms which are 
 more especially discussed in the common logic, where 
 they are usually treated as forms of conscious thought 
 only. Logic therefore coincides with Metaphysics, the 
 science of things set and held in thoughts, — thoughts ac- 
 credited able to express the essential reality of things. 
 
 An exposition of the relation in which such forms 
 as notion, judgment, and syllogism stand to others. 
 
46 PRELIMINARY NOTION. [24. 
 
 such as causality, is a matter for the science itself. 
 But this much is evident beforehand. If thought tries 
 to form ?. notion of things, this notion (as well as its 
 proximate phases, the judgment and syllogism) cannot 
 be composed of articles and relations which are alien 
 and irrelevant to the things. Reflection, it was said 
 above, conducts to the universal of things : which uni- 
 versal is itself one of the constituent factors of a notion. 
 To say that Reason or Understanding is in the world, 
 is equivalent in its import to the phrase ' Objective 
 Thought.' The latter phrase however has the incon- 
 venience that thought is usually confined to express 
 what belongs to the mind or consciousness only, while 
 objective is a term applied, at least primarily, only to 
 the non-mental. 
 
 (i) To speak of thought or objective thought as the heart 
 and soul of the world, may seem to be ascribing conscious- 
 ness to the things of nature. We feel a certain repugnance 
 against making thought the inward function of things, 
 especially as we speak of thought as marking the divergence 
 of man from nature. It would be necessary, therefore, if 
 we use the term thought at all, to speak of nature as the 
 system of unconscious thought, or, to use ScheUing's 
 expression, a petrified intelligence. And in order to prevent 
 misconception, thought-form or thought-type should be 
 substituted for the ambiguous term thought. 
 
 From what has been said the principles of logic are to be 
 sought in a system of thought-types or fundamental cate- 
 gories, in which the opposition between subjective and 
 objective, in its usual sense, vanishes. The signification 
 thus attached to thought and its characteristic forms may be 
 illustrated by the ancient saying that 'vovs governs the 
 world,' or by our own phrase that ' Reason is in the 
 world ' : which means that Reason is the soul of the world 
 it inhabits, its immanent principle, its most proper and 
 inward nature, its universal. Another illustration is offered 
 by the circumstance that in speaking of some definite 
 
24.] THE WORLD-REASON — THOUGHT IN THINGS. 47 
 
 animal we say it is (an) animal. Now, the animal, qua 
 animal, cannot be shown ; nothing can be pointed out 
 excepting some special animal. Animal, qua animal, does 
 not exist: it is merely the universal nature of the individual 
 animals, whilst each existing animal is a more concretely 
 defined and particularised thing. But to be an animal,— the 
 law of kind which is the universal in this case,— is the 
 property of the particular animal, and constitutes its definite 
 essence. Take away from the dog its aniinality, and it be- 
 comes impossible to say what it is. All things have a 
 permanent inward nature, as well as an outward existence. 
 They live and die, arise and pass away ; but their essential 
 and universal part is the kind ; and this means much more 
 than something common to them all. 
 
 If thought is the constitutive substance of external things, 
 it is also the universal substance of what is spiritual. In all 
 human perception thought is present ; so too thought is the 
 universal in all the acts of conception and recollection ; in 
 short, in every mental activity, in willing, wishing and the 
 like. All these faculties are only further specialisations of 
 thought. When it is presented in this light, thought has 
 a different part to play from what it has if we speak of a 
 faculty of thought, one among a crowd of other faculties, 
 such as perception, conception and will, with which it stands 
 on the same level. When it is seen to be the true universal 
 of all that nature and mind contain, it extends its scope far 
 beyond all these, and becomes the basis of everything. From 
 this view of thought, in its objective meaning as vovs, we may 
 next pass to consider the subjective sense of the term. We 
 say first, Man is a being that thinks ; but we also say at the 
 same time, Man is a being that perceives and wills. Man is a 
 thinker, and is universal: but he is a thinker only because 
 he feels his own universality. The animal too is by impli- 
 cation universal, but the universal is not consciously felt by 
 it to be universal : it feels only the individual. The animal 
 sees a singular object, for instance, its food, or a man. For 
 the animal all this never goes beyond an individual thing. 
 Similarly, sensation has to do with nothing but singulars, 
 such as this pain or this sweet taste. Nature does not bring 
 
48 PRELIMINARY NOTION. [24. 
 
 its vovs into consciousness : it is man who first makes him- 
 self double so as to be a universal for a universal. This 
 first happens when man knows that he is ' I.' By the term 
 ' I ' I mean myself, a single and altogether determinate 
 person. And yet I really utter nothing peculiar to myself, 
 for every one else is an ' I ' or ' Ego,' and when I call my- 
 self I,' though I indubitably mean the single person myself, 
 I express a thorough universal. ' I,' therefore, is mere 
 being-for-self, in which everything peculiar or marked is 
 renounced and buried out of sight; it is as it were the ultimate 
 and unanalysable point of consciousness. We may say ' I ' 
 and thought are the same, or, more definitely, * I ' is thought 
 as a thinker. What I have in my consciousness, is for me. 
 ' I ' is the vacuum or receptacle for anything and everything : 
 for which everything is and which stores up everything in 
 itself. Every man is a whole world of conceptions, that lie 
 buried in the night of the ' Ego.' It follows that the ' Ego ' 
 is the universal in which we leave aside all that is particular, 
 and in which at the same time all the particulars have a 
 latent existence. In other words, it is not a mere universality 
 and nothing more, but the universality which includes in it 
 everything. Commonly we use the word ' I ' without 
 attaching much importance to it, nor is it an object of study 
 except to philosophical analysis. In the ' Ego,' we have 
 thought before us in its utter purity. While the brute cannot 
 say ' I,' man can, because it is his nature to think. Now in 
 the ' Ego ' there are a variety of contents, derived both from 
 within and from without, and according to the nature of these 
 contents our state may be described as perception, or con- 
 ception, or reminiscence. But in all of them the ' I ' is 
 found : or in them all thought is present. Man, therefore, is 
 always thinking, even in his perceptions : if he observes 
 anything, he always observes it as a universal, fixes on a 
 single point which he places in relief, thus withdrawing l\is 
 attention from other points, and takes it as abstract and uni- 
 versal, even if the universality be only in form. 
 
 In the case of our ordinary conceptions, two things may 
 happen. Either the contents are moulded by thought, but 
 not the form : or, the form belongs to thought and not the 
 
24.] PURE ABSTRACT THOUGHT. 49 
 
 contents. In using such terms, for instance, as anger, rose, 
 hope, I am speaking of things which I have learnt in the 
 way of sensation, but I express these contents in a universal 
 mode, that is, in the forni of thought. I have left out much 
 that is particular and given the contents in their generality: 
 but still the contents remain sense-derived. On the other 
 hand, when I represent God, the content is undeniably a 
 product of pure thought, but the form still retains the sen- 
 suous limitations which it has as I find it immediately 
 present in myself. In these generalised images the content 
 is not merely and simply sensible, as it is in a visual inspec- 
 tion ; but either the content is sensuous and the form apper- 
 tains to thought, or vice versa. In the first case the material 
 is given to us, and our thought suppHes the form : in the 
 second case the content which has its source in thought is 
 by means of the form turned into a something given, which 
 accordingly reaches the mind from without. 
 
 (2) Logic is the study of thought pure and simple, or of 
 the pure thouglit-forms. In the ordinary sense of the term, 
 by thought we generally represent to ourselves something 
 more than simple and unmixed thought ; we mean some 
 thought, the material of which is from experience. Whereas 
 in logic a thought is understood to include nothing else but 
 what depends on thinking and what thinking has brought 
 into existence. It is in these circumstances that thoughts 
 are pure thoughts. The mind is then in its own home-ele- 
 ment and therefore free : for freedom means that the other 
 thing with which you deal is a second self— so that you 
 never leave your own ground but give the law to your- 
 self. In the impulses or appetites the beginning is from 
 something else, from something which we feel to be ex- 
 ternal. In this case then we speak of dependence. For 
 freedom it is necessary that we should feel no presence of 
 something else which is not ourselves. The natural man, 
 whose motions follow the rule only of his appetites, is not 
 his own master. Be he as self-willed as he may, the con- 
 stituents of his will and opinion are not his own, and his free- 
 dom is merely formal. But when we think, we renounce 
 our selfish and particular being, sink ourselves in the thing, 
 
 VOL. II. E 
 
50 PRELIMINARY NOTION. [24. 
 
 allow thought to follow its own course, and,— if we add any- 
 thing of our own, we think ill. 
 
 If in pursuance of the foregoing remarks we consider 
 Logic to be the system of the pure types of thought, we find 
 that the other philosophical sciences, the Philosophy of 
 Nature and the Philosophy of Mind, take the place, as it 
 were, of an Applied Logic, and that Logic is the soul which 
 animates them both. Their problem in that case is only to 
 recognise the logical forms under the shap>es they assume 
 in Nature and Mind,— shapes which are only a particular 
 mode of expression for the forms of pure thought. If for 
 instance we take the syllogism (not as it was understood in 
 the old formal logic, but at its real value), we shall find it 
 gives expression to the law that the particular is the middle 
 term which fuses together the extremes of the universal 
 and the singular. The syllogistic form is a universal form 
 of all things. Everything that exists is a particular, which 
 couples together the universal and the singular. But Nature 
 is weak and fails to exhibit the logical forms in their purity. 
 Such a feeble exemplification of the syllogism may be seen 
 in the magnet. In the middle or point of indifference of a 
 magnet, its two poles, however they may be distinguished, 
 are brought into one. Phj'sics also teaches us to see the 
 universal or essence in Nature : and the only difference 
 between it and the Philosophy of Nature is that the latter 
 brings before our mind the adequate forms of the notion in 
 the physical world. 
 
 It will now be understood that Logic is the all-animating 
 spirit of all the sciences, and its categories the spiritual hier- 
 archy. They are the heart and centre of things : and yetat 
 the same time they are always on our lips, and, apparently 
 at least, perfectly familiar objects. But things thus familiar 
 are usually the greatest strangers. Being, for example, is 
 a category of pure thought: but to make *Is' an object of 
 investigation never occurs to us. Common fancy puts the 
 Absolute far away in a world beyond. The Absolute is 
 rather directly before us, so present that so long as we 
 think, we must, though without express consciousness of it, 
 always carry it with us and always use it. Language is the 
 
24.] THE LOGICAL CATEGORIES. 5 1 
 
 main depository of these t^'pes of thought ; and one use of 
 the grammatical instruction which children receive is un- 
 consciously to turn their attention to distinctions of thought. 
 
 Logic is usually said to be concerned with forms only and 
 to derive the material for them from elsewhere. But this 
 ' only,' which assumes that the logical thoughts are nothing 
 in comparison with the rest of the contents, is not the word 
 to use r'jout forms which are the absolutely-real ground of 
 everything. Everything else rather is an 'only' compared 
 wuth these thoughts. To make such abstract forms a problem 
 pre-supposes in the inquirer a higher level of culture than 
 ordinary ; and to study them in themselves and for their 
 own sake signifies in addition that these thought-tj'^pes must 
 be deduced out of thought itself, and their truth or reality 
 examined by the light of their own laws. We do not assume 
 them as data from without, and then define them or exhibit 
 their value and authority by comparing them with the shape 
 they take in our minds. If we thus acted, we should pro- 
 ceed from observation and experience, and should, for 
 instance, say we habitually employ the term ' force ' in such 
 a case, and such a meaning. A definition like that would be 
 called correct, if it agreed with the conception of its object 
 present in our ordinary state of mind. The defect of this 
 empirical method is that a notion is not defined as it is in 
 and for itself, but in terms of something assumed, which is 
 then used as a criterion and standard of correctness. No 
 such test need be applied : we have merely to let the 
 thought- forms follow the impulse of their own organic life. 
 
 To ask if a category is true or not, must sound strange 
 to the ordinary mind: for a category apparently becomes 
 true only when it is applied to a given object, and apart 
 from this application it would seem meaningless to inquire 
 into its truth. But this is the very question on which 
 everything turns. We must however in the first place un- 
 derstand clearly what we mean by Truth. In common life 
 truth means the agreement of an object with our conception 
 of it. We thus pre-suppose an object to which our concep- 
 tion must conform. In the philosophical sense of the word, 
 on the other hand, truth may be described, in general 
 E 2 
 
52 PRELIMINARY NOTION. [24. 
 
 abstract terms, as the agreement of a thought-content with 
 itself. This meaning is quite different from the one given 
 above. At the same time the deeper and philosophical 
 meaning of truth can be partially traced even in the ordinary 
 usage of language. Thus we speak of a true friend ; by 
 which we mean a friend whose manner of conduct accords 
 with the notion of friendship. In the same way we speak 
 of a true work of Art. Untrue in this sense means the 
 same as bad, or self-discordant. In this sense a bad state is 
 an untrue state ; and evil and untruth may be said to consist 
 in the contradiction subsisting between the function or no- 
 tion and the existence of the object. Of such a bad object 
 we may form a correct representation, but the import of such 
 representation is inherently false. Of these correctnesses, 
 which are at the same time untruths, we may have many in 
 our heads.— God alone is the thorough harmony of notion 
 and reality. All finite things involve an untruth : they have a 
 notion and an existence, but their existence does not meet 
 the requirements of the notion. For this reason they must 
 perish, and then the incompatibility between their notion 
 and their existence becomes manifest. It is in the kind 
 that the individual animal has its notion : and the kind 
 liberates itself from this individuality by death. 
 
 The study of truth, or, as it is here explained to mean, 
 consistency, constitutes the proper problem of logic. In our 
 every-day mind we are never troubled with questions about 
 the truth of the forms of thought. — We may also express the 
 problem of logic by saying that it examines the forms of 
 thought touching their capability to hold truth. And the 
 question comes to this : What are the forms of the infinite, 
 and what are the forms of the finite ? Usually no suspicion 
 attaches to the finite forms of thought ; they are allowed to 
 pass unquestioned. But it is from conforming to finite cate- 
 gories in thought and action that all deception originates. 
 
 (3) Truth may be ascertained by several methods, each 
 of which however is no more than a form. Experience is 
 the first of these methods. But the method is only a 
 form : it has no intrinsic value of its own. For in experience 
 everything depends upon the mind we bring to bear upon 
 
24.] LOGICAL TRUTH. 53 
 
 actuality. A great mind is great in its experience ; and in 
 the motley play of phenomena at once perceives the point of 
 real significance. The idea is present, in actual shape, not 
 something, as it were, over the hill and far away. The 
 genius of a Goethe, for example, looking into nature or 
 history, has great experiences, catches sight of the living 
 principle, and gives expression to it. A second method of 
 apprehending the truth is Reflection, which defines it by 
 intellectual relations of condition and conditioned. But in 
 these two modes the absolute truth has not yet found its 
 appropriate form. The most perfect method of knowledge 
 proceeds in the pure form of thought : and here the attitude 
 of man is one of entire freedom. 
 
 That the form of thought is the perfect form, and that 
 it presents the truth as it intrinsically and actually is, is 
 the general dogma of all philosophy. To give a proof of 
 the dogma there is, in the first instance, nothing to do 
 but show that these other forms of knowledge are finite. 
 The grand Scepticism of antiquity accomplished this task 
 when it exhibited the contradictions contained in every one 
 of these forms. That Scepticism indeed went further : but 
 when it ventured to assail the forms of reason, it began by 
 insinuating under them something finite upon which it 
 might fasten. All the forms of finite thought will make 
 their appearance in the course of logical development, the 
 order in which they present themselves being determined 
 by necessary laws. Here in the introduction they could 
 only be unscientifically assumed as something given. In 
 the theory of logic itself these forms will be exhibited, not 
 only on their negative, but also on their positive side. 
 
 When we compare the different forms of ascertaining 
 truth with one another, the first of them, immediate know- 
 ledge, may perhaps seem the finest, noblest and most 
 appropriate. It includes everything which the moralists 
 term innocence as well as religious feeling, simple trust, 
 love, fidelity, and natural faith. The two other forms, first 
 reflective, and secondly philosophical cognition, must leave 
 that unsought natural harmony behind. And so far as they 
 have this in common, the methods which claim to appre- 
 
54 PRELIMINARY NOTION. [24. 
 
 hend the truth- by thought may naturally be regarded as 
 part and parcel of the pride which leads man to trust to his 
 own powers for a knowledge of the truth. Such a position 
 involves a thorough-going disruption, and, viewed in that 
 light, might be regarded as the source of all evil and wicked- 
 ness -the original transgression. Apparently therefore the 
 only way of being reconciled and restored to peace is to 
 surrender all claims to think or know. 
 
 This lapse from natural unity has not escaped notice, 
 and nations from the earliest times have asked the meaning 
 of the wonderful division of the spirit against itself. No 
 such inward disunion is found in nature : natural things do 
 nothing wicked. 
 
 The Mosaic legend of the Fall of Man has preserved an 
 ancient picture representing the origin and consequences of 
 this disunion. The incidents of the legend form the basis 
 of an essential article of the creed, the doctrine of original 
 sin in man and his consequent need of succour. It may be 
 well at the commencement of logic to examine the story 
 which treats of the origin and the bearings of the very 
 knowledge which logic has to discuss. For, though philo- 
 sophy must not allow herself to be overawed by religion, 
 or accept the position of existence on sufferance, she can- 
 not afford to neglect these popular conceptions. The tales 
 and allegories of religion, which have enjoyed for thousands 
 of years the veneration of nations, are not to be set aside as 
 antiquated even now. 
 
 Upon a closer inspection of the story of the Fall we find, 
 as was already said, that it exemplifies the universal bearings 
 of knowledge upon the spiritual life. In its instinctive and 
 natural stage, spiritual life wears the garb of innocence and 
 confiding simplicity : but the very essence of spirit implies 
 the absorption of this immediate condition in something 
 higher. The spiritual is distinguished from the natural, 
 and more especially from the animal, life, in the circum- 
 stance that it does not continue a mere stream of tendency, 
 but sunders itself to self-realisation. But this position of 
 severed life has in its turn to be suppressed, and the spirit 
 has by its own act to win its way to concord again. The 
 
24.] STORY OF THE FALL. 55 
 
 final concord then is spiritual ; that is, the principle of re- 
 storation is found in thought, and thought only. The hand 
 that inflicts the wound is also the hand which heals it. 
 
 We are told in our story that Adam and Eve, the first 
 human beings, the types of humanitj', were placed in a 
 garden, where grew a tree of life and a tree of the know- 
 ledge of good and evil. God, it is said, had forbidden them 
 to eat of the fruit of this latter tree : of the tree of life for 
 the present nothing further is said. These words evidently 
 assume that man is not intended to seek knowledge, and 
 ought to remain in the state of innocence. Other medita- 
 tive races, it may be remarked, have held the same belief 
 that the primitive state of mankind was one of innocence 
 and harmony. Now all this is to a certain extent correct. 
 The disunion that appears throughout humanity is not a 
 condition to rest in. But it is a mistake to regard the 
 natural and immediate harmony as the right state. The 
 mind is not mere instinct : on the contrary, it essentially 
 involves the tendency to reasoning and meditation. Child- 
 like innocence no doubt has in it something fascinating and 
 attractive : but only because it reminds us of what the spirit 
 must win for itself. The harmoniousness of childhood is a 
 gift from the hand of nature : the second harmony must 
 spring from the labour and culture of the spirit. And so 
 the words of Christ, ' Except ye become as little children,' 
 &c., are very far from telling us that we must always remain 
 children. 
 
 Again, we find in the narrative of Moses that the occasion 
 which led man to leave his natural unity is attributed to 
 solicitation from without. The serpent was the tempter. 
 But the truth is, that the step into opposition, the awakening 
 of consciousness, follows from the very nature of man : and 
 the same history repeats itself in every son of Adam. The 
 serpent represents likeness to God as consisting in the 
 knowledge of good and evil : and it is just this knowledge in 
 which man participates when he breaks with the unity of 
 his instinctive being and eats of the forbidden fruit. The 
 first reflection of awakened consciousness in men told them 
 that they were naked. This is a naive and profound trait. 
 
56 PRELIMINARY NOTION. [24. 
 
 For the sense of shame bears evidence to the separation of 
 man from his natural and sensuous life. The beasts never 
 get so far as this separation, and they feel no shame. And 
 it is in the human feeling of shame that we are to seek the 
 spiritual and moral origin of dress, compared with which 
 the merely physical need is a secondary matter. 
 
 Next comes the Curse, as it is called, which God pro- 
 nounced upon man. The prominent point in that curse 
 turns chiefly on the contrast between man and nature. Man 
 must work in the sweat of his brow : and woman bring forth 
 in sorrow. As to work, if it is the result of the disunion, it 
 is also the victory over it. The beasts have nothing more to 
 do but to pick up the materials required to satisfy their 
 wants : man on the contrary can only satisfy his wants by 
 himself producing and transforming the necessary means. 
 Thus even in these outside things man is dealing with 
 himself. 
 
 The story does not close with the expulsion from Paradise. 
 We are further told, God said, ' Behold Adam is become as 
 one of us, to know good and evil.' Knowledge is now 
 spoken of as divine, and not, as before, as something wrong 
 and forbidden. Such words contain a confutation of the 
 idle talk that philosophy pertains only to the finitude of the 
 mind. Philosophy is knowledge, and it is through know- 
 ledge that man first realises his original vocation, to be the 
 image of God. When the record adds that God drove men 
 out of the Garden of Eden to prevent their eating of the tree 
 of life, it only means that on his natural side certainly man 
 is finite and mortal, but in knowledge infinite. 
 
 We all know the theological dogma that man's nature is 
 evil, tainted with what is called Original Sin. Now while we 
 accept the dogma, we must give up the setting of incident 
 which represents original sin as consequent upon an acci- 
 dental act of the first man. For the very notion of spirit is 
 enough to show that man is evil by nature, and it is an error 
 to imagine that he could ever be otherwise. To such extent 
 as man is and acts like a creature of nature, his whole be- 
 haviour is what it ought not to be. For the spirit it is a 
 duty to be free, and to realise itself by its own act. Nature 
 
24-25.] STORY OF THE FALL. 57 
 
 is for man only the starting-point which he has to transform. 
 The theological doctrine of original sin is a profound truth ; 
 but modern enlightenment prefers to believe that man is 
 naturally good, and that he acts right so long as he continues 
 true to nature. 
 
 The hour when man leaves the path of mere natural 
 being marks the difference between him, a self-conscious 
 agent, and the natural world. But this schism, though it 
 forms a necessary element in the very notion of spirit, is 
 not the final goal of man. It is to this state of inward breach 
 that the whole finite action of thought and will belongs. 
 In that finite sphere man pursues ends of his own and 
 draws from himself the material of his conduct. While he 
 pursues these aims to the uttermost, while his knowledge 
 and his will seek himself, his own narrow self apart from 
 the universal, he is evil ; and his evil is to be subjective. 
 
 We seem at first to have a double evil here : but both 
 are really the same. Man in so far as he is spirit is not the 
 creature of nature : and wiien he behaves as such, and 
 follows the cravings of appetite, he wills to be so. The 
 natural wickedness of man is therefore unUke the natural 
 life of animals. A mere natural life may be more exactly de- 
 fined by saying that the natural man as such is an individual : 
 for nature in every part is in the bonds of individualism. 
 Thus when man wills to be a creature of nature, he wills in 
 the same degree to be an individual simply. Yet against 
 such impulsive and appetitive action, due to the individualism 
 of nature, there also steps in the law or general principle. 
 This law may either be an external force, or have the form 
 of divine authority. So long as he continues in his natural 
 state, man is in bondage to the law. — It is true that among 
 the instincts and affections of man, there are social or 
 benevolent inclinations, love, sympathy, and others, reach- 
 ing beyond his selfish isolation. But so long as these 
 tendencies are instinctive, their virtual universality of scope 
 and purport is vitiated by the subjective form which always 
 allows free play to self-seeking and random action. 
 
 25.] The term ' Objective Thoughts ' indicates the 
 /nUh — the truth which is to be the absolute object of philo- 
 
58 PRELIMINARY NOTION. [25. 
 
 sophy, and not merely the goal at which it aims. But 
 the very expression cannot fail to suggest an opposi- 
 tion, to characterise and appreciate which is the main 
 motive of the philosophical attitude of the present time, 
 and which forms the real problem of the question about 
 truth and our means of ascertaining it. If the thought- 
 forms are vitiated by a fixed antithesis, i.e. if they are 
 only of a finite character, they are unsuitable for the 
 self-centred universe of truth, and truth can find no 
 adequate receptacle in thought. Such thought, which 
 can produce only limited and partial categories and 
 proceed by their means, is what in the stricter sense 
 of the word is termed Understanding. The finitude, 
 further, of these categories lies in two points. Firstly, 
 they are only subjective, and the antithesis of an ob- 
 jective permanently clings to them. Secondly, they 
 are always of restricted content, and so persist in 
 antithesis to one another and still more to the Abso- 
 lute. In order more fully to explain the position and 
 import here attributed to logic, the attitudes in which 
 thought is supposed to stand to objectivity will next be 
 examined by way of further introduction. 
 
 In my Phenomenology of the Spirit, which on that 
 account was at its publication described as the first part 
 of the System of Philosophy, the method adopted was 
 to begin with the first and simplest phase of mind, im- 
 mediate consciousness, and to show how that stage 
 gradually of necessity worked onward to the philoso- 
 phical point of view, the necessity of that view being 
 proved by the process. But in these circumstances it 
 was impossible to restrict the quest to the mere form 
 of consciousness. For the stage of philosophical know- 
 ledge is the richest in material and organisation, and 
 therefore, as it came before us in the shape of a result, 
 it pre-supposed the existence of the concrete formations 
 
25-] CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES. 59 
 
 of consciousness, such as individual and social morality, 
 art and religion. In the development of consciousness, 
 which at first sight appears limited to the point of form 
 merely, there is thus at the same time included the 
 development of the matter or of the objects discussed 
 in the special branches of philosophy. But the latter 
 process must, so to speak, go on behind consciousness, 
 since those facts are the essential nucleus which is raised 
 into consciousness. The exposition accordingly is ren- 
 dered more intricate, because so much that properly 
 belongs to the concrete branches is prematurely dragged 
 into the introduction. The survey which follows in the 
 present work has even more the inconvenience of being 
 only historical and inferential in its method. But it 
 tries especially to show how the questions men have 
 proposed, outside the school, on the nature of Know- 
 ledge, Faith and the like, — questions which they imagine 
 to have no connexion with abstract thoughts, — are really 
 reducible to the simple categories, which first get cleared 
 up in Logic. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 FIRST ATTITUDE OF THOUGHT TO OBJECTIVITY. 
 
 26.] The first of these' attitudes of thought is seen in 
 the method which has no doubts and no sense of the 
 contradiction in thought, or of the hostility of thought 
 against itself. It entertains an unquestioning belief 
 that reflection is the means of ascertaining the truth, 
 and of bringing the objects before the mind as they 
 really are. And in this belief it advances straight upon 
 its objects, takes the materials furnished by sense and 
 perception, and reproduces them from itself as facts of 
 thought ; and then, believing this result to be the truth, 
 the method is content. Philosophy in its earliest stages, 
 all the sciences, and even the daily action and move- 
 ment of consciousness, live in this faith. 
 
 27.] This method of thought has never become aware 
 of the antithesis of subjective and objective : and to that 
 extent there is nothing to prevent its statements from 
 possessing a genuinely philosophical and speculative 
 character, though it is just as possible that they may 
 never get beyond finite categories, or the stage where 
 the antithesis is still unresolved. In the present in- 
 troduction the main question for us is to observe this 
 attitude of thought in its extreme form ; and we shall 
 accordingly first of all examine its second and inferior 
 aspect as a philosophic system. One of the clearest 
 
27-a8.] PRE-KANTIAN METAPHYSIC. 6l 
 
 instances of it, and one lying nearest to ourselves, may 
 be found in the Metaphysic of the Past as it subsisted 
 among us previous to the philosophy of Kant. It is 
 however only in reference to the history of philosophy 
 that this Metaphysic can be said to belong to the past : 
 the thing is always and at all places to be found, as the 
 view whi'i'h the abstract understanding takes of the ob- 
 jects of reason. And it is in this point that the real and 
 immediate good lies of a closer examination of its main 
 scope and its modus operandi. 
 
 28.] This metaphysical system took the laws and 
 forms of thought to be the fundamental laws and forms 
 of things. It assumed that to think a thing was the 
 means of finding its very self and nature : and to that 
 extent it occupied higher ground than the Critical 
 Philosophy which succeeded it. But in the first in- 
 stance (i) these terms of thought were cut off from their 
 connexion, their solidarity; each was believed valid by 
 itself and capable of serving as a predicate of the truth. 
 It was the general assumption of this metaphysic that 
 a knowledge of the Absolute was gained by assigning 
 predicates to it. It neither inquired what the terms of 
 the understanding specially meant or what they were 
 •orth, nor did it test the method which characterises 
 the Absolute by the assignment of predicates. 
 
 As an example of such predica*:es may be taken. 
 Existence, in the proposition, * God has existence : ' 
 Finitude or Infinity, as in the question, 'Is the world 
 finite or infinite?' : Simple and Complex, in u.e propo- 
 sition, ' The soul is simple,' — or again, ' The thing is a 
 unity, a whole,' &c. Nobody asked whether such predi- 
 cates had any intrinsic and independent truth, or if the 
 propositional form could be a form of truth. 
 
 The Metaphysic of the past assumed, as unsophisticated 
 belief always does that thought apprehends the very self of 
 
62 FIRST ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [28. 
 
 things, and that things, to become what they truly are, re- 
 quire to be thought. For Nature and the human soul are a 
 very Proteus in their perpetual transformations ; and it soon 
 occurs to the observer that the first crude impression of things 
 is not their essential being.— This is a point of view the very 
 reverse of the result arrived at by the Critical Philosophy ; 
 a result, of which it may be said, that it bade man go and 
 feed on mere husks and chaff. 
 
 We must look more closely into the procedure of that old 
 metaphysic. In the first place it never went beyond the 
 province of the analytic understanding. Without preliminary 
 inquiry it adopted the abstract categories of thought and 
 let them rank as predicates of truth. But in using the term 
 thought we must not forget the difference between finite or 
 discursive thinking and the thinking which is infinite and 
 rational. The categories, as they meet ns prima facie and in 
 isolation, are finite forms. But truth is always infinite, and 
 cannot be expressed or presented to consciousness in finite 
 terms. The phrase infinite thought may excite surprise, if 
 we adhere to the modern conception that thought is always 
 limited. But it is, speaking rightly, the very essence of 
 thought to be infinite. The nominal explanation of calling 
 a thing finite is that it has an end, that it exists up to a 
 certain point only, where it comes into contact with, and is 
 limited by, its other. The finite therefore subsists in 
 reference to its other, which is its negation and presents 
 itself as its limit. Now thought is always in its own sphere ; 
 its relations are with itself, and it is its own object. In 
 having a thought for object, I am at home with myself. The 
 thinking power, the ' I,' is therefore infinite, because, when 
 it thinks, it is in relation to an object which is itself. Gene- 
 rally speaking, an object means a something else, a negative 
 confronting me. But in the case where thought thinks 
 itself, it has an object which is at the same time no object : 
 in other words, its objectivity is suppressed and transformed 
 into an idea. Thought, as thought, therefore in its unmixed 
 nature involves no limits ; it is finite only when it keeps to 
 limited categories, which it beheves to be ultimate. Infinite 
 or speculative thought, on the contrary, while it no less 
 
28.] PRE-KANTIAN METAPHYSIC. 63 
 
 defines, does in the very act of limiting and defining make 
 that defect vanish. And so infinity is not, as most frequently 
 happens, to be conceived as an abstract away and away for 
 ever and ever, but in the simple manner previously indicated. 
 
 The thinking of the old metaphysical system was finite. 
 Its whole mode of action was regulated by categories, the 
 limits of which it believed to be permanently fixed and not 
 subject to any further negation. Thus, one of its questions 
 was : Has God existence ? The question supposes that 
 existence is an altogether positive term, a sort of ne plus 
 ultra. We shall see however at a later point that existence 
 is by no means a merely positive term, but one which is too 
 low for the Absolute Idea, and unworthy of God. A second 
 question in these metaphysical systems was : Is the world 
 finite or infinite ? The very terms of the question assume 
 that the finite is a permanent contradictor}' to the infinite : 
 and one can easily see that, when they are so opposed, the 
 infinite, which of course ought to be the whole, only appears 
 as a single aspect and suffers restriction from the finite. 
 But a restricted infinity is itself only a finite. In the same 
 way it was asked whether the soul was simple or composite. 
 Simpleness was, in other words, taken to be an ultimate 
 characteristic, giving expression to a whole truth. Far from 
 being so, simpleness is the expression of a half-truth, as 
 one-sided and abstract as existence :— a term of thought, 
 which, as we shall hereafter see, is itself untrue and hence 
 unable to hold truth. If the soul be viewed as merely and 
 abstractly simple, it is characterised in an inadequate and 
 finite way. 
 
 It was therefore the main question of the pre-Kantian 
 metaphysic to discover whether predicates of the kind 
 mentioned were to be ascribed to its objects. Now these 
 predicates are after all only limited formulae of the under- 
 standing which, instead of expressing the truth, merely 
 impose a limit. More than this, it should be noted that the 
 chief feature of the method lay in ' assigning ' or ' attributing' 
 predicates to the object that was to be cognised, for example, 
 to God. But attribution is no more than an external re- 
 flection about the object : the predicates by which the 
 
64 FIRST ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [28-29. 
 
 object is to be determined are supplied from the resources 
 of picture-thought, and are applied in a mechanical way. 
 Whereas, if we are to have genuine cognition, the object 
 must characterise its own self and not derive its predicates 
 from without. Even supposing we follow the method of 
 predicating, the mind cannot help feeling that predicates of 
 this sort fail to exhaust the object. From the same point of 
 view the Orientals are quite correct in calling God the many- 
 named or the myriad-named One. One after another of 
 these finite categories leaves the soul unsatisfied, and the 
 Oriental sage is compelled unceasingly to seek for more and 
 more of such predicates. In finite things it is no doubt the 
 case that they have to be characterised through finite predi- 
 cates : and with these things the understanding finds proper 
 scope for its special action. Itself finite, it knows only the 
 nature of the finite. Thus, when I call some action a theft, 
 I have characterised the action in its essential facts : and 
 such a knowledge is sufficient for the judge. Similarly, 
 finite things stand to each other as cause and effect, force 
 and exercise, and when they are apprehended in these 
 categories, they are known in their finitude. But the objects 
 of reason cannot be defined by these finite predicates. To 
 try to do so was the defect of the old metaphysic. 
 
 29.] Predicates of this kind, taken individually, have 
 but a limited range of meaning, and no one can fail to 
 perceive how inadequate they are, and how far they fall 
 below the fulness of detail which our imaginative thought 
 gives, in the case, for example, of God, Mind, or Nature. 
 Besides, though the fact of their being all predicates of 
 one subject supplies them with a certain connexion, 
 their several meanings keep them apart : and conse- 
 quently each is brought in as a stranger in relation to 
 the others. 
 
 The first of these defects the Orientals sought to 
 remedy, when, for example, they defined God by attri- 
 buting to Him many names; but still they felt that the 
 number of names would have had to be infinite. 
 
30-3r.] PRE-KANTIAN META PHYSIC. 65 
 
 30.] (2) In the second place, the metaphysical systems 
 adopted a wrong criterion. Their objects were no doubt 
 totalities which in their own proper selves belong to 
 reason, — that is, to the organised and systematically- 
 developed universe, of thought. But these totalities — 
 God, the Soul, the World, — were taken by the meta- 
 physician as subjects made and ready, to form the 
 basis for an application of the categories of the under- 
 standing. They were assumed from popular conception. 
 Accordingly popular conception was the only canon for 
 settling whether or not the predicates were suitable and 
 sufficient. 
 
 31.] The common conceptions of God, the Soul, the 
 World, may be supposed to afford thought a firm and 
 fast footing. They do not really do so. Besides having 
 a particular and subjective character clinging to them, 
 and thus leaving room for great variety of interpreta- 
 tion, they themselves first of all require a firm and fast 
 definition by thought. This may be seen in any of 
 these propositions where the predicate, or in philo- 
 sophy the category, is needed to indicate what the sub- 
 ject, or the conception we start with, is. 
 
 In such a sentence as ' God is eternal,' we begin with 
 the conception of God, not knowing as yet what he is : 
 to tell us that, is the business of the predicate. In the 
 principles of logic, accordingly, where the terms formu- 
 lating the subject-matter are those of thought only, it is 
 not merely superfluous to make these categories predi- 
 cates to propositions in which God, or, still vaguer, the 
 Absolute, is the subject, but it would also have the 
 disadvantage of suggesting another canon than the 
 nature of thought. Besides, the prepositional form 
 (and for proposition, it would be more correct to sub- 
 stitute judgment) is not suited to express the concrete 
 — and the true is always concrete — or the speculative. 
 
 VOL. II. F 
 
66 FIRST ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [31-33. 
 
 Every judgment is by its form one-sided and, to that 
 extent, false. 
 
 This metaphysic was not free or objective thinking. In- 
 stead of letting the object freely and spontaneously expound 
 its own characteristics, metaphysic pre-supposed it ready- 
 made. If anyone wishes to know what free thought means, 
 he must go to Greek philosophy : for Scholasticism, Hke 
 these metaphysical systems, accepted its facts, and accepted 
 them as a dogma from the authority of the Church. We 
 moderns, too, by our whole up-bringing, have been initiated 
 into ideas which it is extremely difficult to overstep, on 
 account of their far-reaching significance. But the ancient 
 philosophers were in a different position. They were men 
 who lived wholly in the perceptions of the senses, and who, 
 after their rejection of mythology and its fancies, pre-sup- 
 posed nothing but the heaven above and the earth around. 
 In these material, non-metaphysical surroundings, thought 
 is free and enjoys its own privacy,— cleared of everything 
 material, and thoroughly at home. This feeling that we are 
 all our own is characteristic of free thought — of that voyage 
 into the open, where nothing is below us or above us, and 
 we stand in solitude with ourselves alone. 
 
 ^2.] (3) In the third place, this system of metaphysic 
 turned into Dogmatism. When our thought never 
 ranges beyond narrow and rigid terms, we are forced 
 to assume that of two opposite assertions, such as were 
 the above propositions, the one must be true and the 
 other false. 
 
 Dogmatism may be most simply described as the contrary 
 of Scepticism. The ancient Sceptics gave the name of 
 Dogmatism to every philosophy whatever holding a system 
 of definite doctrine. In this large sense Scepticism may 
 apply the name even to philosophy which is properly Specu- 
 lative. But in the narrower sense, Dogmatism consists in 
 the tenacity which draws a hard and fast line between cer- 
 tain terms and others opposite to them. We may see this 
 clearly in the strict * Either— or ' : for instance, The world is 
 
32-33.] ONTOLOGY. 67 
 
 either finite or infinite ; but one of these two it must be. 
 The contrary of this rigidity is the characteristic of all 
 Speculative truth. There no such inadequate formulae 
 are allowed, nor can they possibly exhaust it. These for- 
 mulae Speculative truth holds in union as a totality, whereas 
 Dogmatism invests them in their isolation with a title to 
 fixity and truth. 
 
 It often happens in philosophy that the half-truth takes 
 its place beside the whole truth and assumes on its own 
 account the position of something permanent. But the fact 
 is that the half-truth, instead of being a fixed or self-sub- 
 sistent principle, is a mere element absolved and included 
 in the whole. The metaphysic of understanding is dog- 
 matic, because it maintains half-truths in their isolation: 
 whereas the idealism of speculative philosophy carries out 
 the principle of totality and shows that it can reach beyond 
 the inadequate formularies of abstract thought. Thus ideal- 
 ism would say :— The soul is neither finite only, nor infinite 
 only ; it is really the one just as much as the other, and in 
 that way neither the one nor the other. In other words, 
 such formularies in their isolation are inadmissible, and 
 only come into account as formative elements in a larger 
 notion. Such idealism we see even in the ordinary phases of 
 consciousness. Thus we say of sensible things, that they 
 are changeable : that is, they are, but it is equally true that 
 they are not. We show more obstinacy in dealing with 
 the categories of the understanding. These are terms 
 which we believe to be somewhat firmer— or even abso- 
 lutely firm and fast. We look upon them as separated from 
 each other by an infinite chasm, so that opposite categories 
 can never get at each other. The battle of reason is the 
 struggle to break up the rigidity to which the understanding 
 has reduced everything. 
 
 33.] The first part of this metaphysic in its systematic 
 form is Ontology, or the doctrine of the abstract 
 characteristics of Being. The multitude of these 
 characteristics, and the limits set to their applicability, 
 are not founded upon any principle. They have in 
 
68 FIRST ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [33-34- 
 
 consequence to be enumerated as experience and cir- 
 cumstances direct, and the import ascribed to them is 
 founded only upon common sensualised conceptions, 
 upon assertions that particular words are used in a par- 
 ticular sense, .*nd even perhaps upon etymology. If 
 experience pronounces the list to be complete, and if 
 the usage of language, by its agreement, shows the 
 analysis to be correct, the metaphysician is satisfied ; 
 and the intrinsic and independent truth and necessity 
 of such characteristics is never made a matter of inves- 
 tigation at all. 
 
 To ask if being, existence, finitude, simplicity, com- 
 plexity, &c. are notions intrinsically and independently 
 true, must surprise those who believe that a question 
 about truth can only concern propositions (as to 
 whether a notion is or is not with truth to be attri- 
 buted, as the phrase is, to a subject), and that falsehood 
 lies in the contradiction existing between the subject in 
 our ideas, and the notion to be predicated of it. Now 
 as the notion is concrete, it and every character of it in 
 general is essentially a self-contained -unity of distinct 
 characteristics. If truth then were nothing more th^.n 
 the absence of contradiction, it would be first of all 
 necessary in the case of every notion to examine 
 whether it, taken individually, did not contain this sort 
 of intrinsic contradiction. 
 
 34.] The second branch of the metaphysical system 
 was Rational Psychology or Pneumatology. It dealt 
 with the metaphysical nature of the Soul, — that is, of 
 t'le Mind regarded as a thing. -It expected to find 
 immortality in a sphere dominated by the laws of com- 
 position, time, qualitative change, and quantitative 
 increase or decrease. 
 
 The name ' rational,' given to this species of psychology, 
 served to contrast it with empirical modes of observing 
 
34.] RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 69 
 
 the phenomena of the soul. Rational psychology viewed 
 the soul in its metaphysical nature, and through the cate- 
 gories supplied by abstract thought. The rationalists en- 
 deavoured to ascertain the inner nature of the soul as it 
 is in itself and as it is for thought.— In philosophy at pre- 
 sent we hear little of the soul : the favourite term now is 
 mind (spirit). The two are distinct, soul being as it were 
 the middle term between body and spirit, or the bond 
 between the two. The mind, as soul, is immersed in 
 corporeity, and the soul is the animating principle of the 
 body. 
 
 The pre-Kantian metaphysic, we say, viewed the soul as 
 a thing. * Thing ' is a very ambiguous word. By a thing, 
 we mean, firstly, an immediate existence, something we re- 
 present in sensuous form: and in this meaning the term 
 has been applied to the soul. Hence the question regard- 
 ing the seat of the soul. Of course, if the soul have a seat, 
 it is in space and sensuously envisaged. So, too, if the 
 soul be viewed as a thing, we can ask whether the soul is 
 simple or composite. The question is important as bear- 
 ing on the immortality of the soul, which is supposed to 
 depend on the absence of composition. But the fact is, 
 that in abstract simplicity we have a category, which as 
 little corresponds to the nature of the soul, as that of com- 
 positeness. 
 
 One word on the relation of rational to empirical psycho- 
 logy. The former, because it sets itself to apply thought 
 to cognise mind and even to demonstrate the result of such 
 thinking, is the higher ; whereas empirical psychology starts 
 from perception, and only recounts and describes what 
 perception supplies. But if we propose to think the mind, 
 we must not be quite so shy of its special phenomena. 
 Mind is essentially active in the same sense as the School- 
 men said that God is ' absolute actuosity.' But if the mind 
 is active it must as it were utter itself. It is wrong therefore 
 to take the mind for a processless ens, as did the old meta- 
 physic which divided the processless inward life of the 
 mind from its outward life. The mind, of all things, must 
 be looked at in its concrete actuality, in its energy ; and 
 
70 FIRST ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [34-35. 
 
 in such a way that its manifestations are seen to be deter- 
 mined by its inward force. 
 
 35.] The third branch of metaphysics was Cosmology. 
 The topics it embraced were the world, its contingency, 
 necessity, eternity, limitation in time and space : the 
 laws (only formal) of its changes : the freedom of man 
 and the origin of evil. 
 
 To these topics it applied what were believed to be 
 thorough-going contrasts : such as contingency and 
 necessity; external and internal necessity; efficient and 
 final cause, or causality in general and design ; essence 
 or substance and phenomenon ; form and matter ; free- 
 dom and necessity; happiness and pain; good and 
 evil. 
 
 The object of Cosmology comprised not merely Nature, 
 but Mind too, in its external complication in its pheno- 
 menon,— in fact, existence in general, or the sum of finite 
 things. This object however it viewed not as a concrete 
 whole, but only under certain abstract points of view. Thus 
 the questions Cosmology attempted to solve were such as 
 these : Is accident or necessity dominant in the world ? Is 
 the world eternal or created ? It was therefore a chief con- 
 cern of this study to lay down what were called general 
 Cosmological laws : for instance, that Nature does not act 
 by fits and starts. And by fits and starts (sal/us) they 
 meant a qualitative difference or qualitative alteration 
 showing itself without any antecedent determining mean : 
 whereas, on the contrary, a gradual change (of quantity) is 
 obviously not without intermediation. 
 
 In regard to Mind as it makes itself felt in the world, the 
 questions which Cosmology chiefly discussed turned upon 
 the freedom of man and the origin of evil. Nobody can 
 deny that these are questions of the highest importance. 
 But to give them a satisfactory answer, it is above all things 
 necessary not to claim finality for the abstract formulae of 
 understanding, or to suppose that each of the two terms in 
 an antithesis has an independent subsistence or can be 
 
35-36.] COSMOLOGY. 7 1 
 
 treated in its isolation as a complete and self-centred truth. 
 This however is the general position taken by the metaphy- 
 sicians before Kant, and appears in their cosmological dis- 
 cussions, which for that reason were incapable of compassing 
 their purpose, to understand the phenomena of the world. 
 Observe how they proceed with the distinction between 
 freedom and necessity, in their application of these cate- 
 gories to Nature and Mind. Nature they regard as subject 
 in its workings to necessity ; Mind they hold to be free. 
 No doubt there is a real foundation for this distinction in 
 the very core of the Mind itself: but freedom and necessity, 
 when thus abstractly opposed, are terms applicable only 
 in the finite world to which, as such, they belong. A free- 
 dom involving no necessity, and mere necessity without 
 freedom, are abstract and in this way untrue formulae of 
 thought. Freedom is no blank indeterminateness : essentially 
 concrete, and unvaryingly self-determinate, it is so far at the 
 same time necessary. Necessity, again, in the ordinary 
 acceptation of the term in popular philosophy, means deter- 
 mination from without only,— as in finite mechanics, where 
 a body moves only when it is struck by another body, and 
 moves in the direction communicated to it by the impact. 
 This however is a merely external necessity, not the real 
 inward necessity which is identical with freedom. 
 
 The case is similar with the contrast of Good and Evil, — 
 the favourite contrast of the introspective modern world. 
 If we regard Evil as possessing a fixity of its own, apart 
 and distinct from Good, we are to a certain extent right : 
 there is an opposition between them : nor do those who 
 maintain the apparent and relative character of the oppo- 
 sition mean that Evil and Good in the Absolute are one, or, 
 in accordance with the modern phrase, that a thing first 
 becomes evil from our way of looking at it. The error 
 arises when we take Evil as a permanent positive, instead 
 of— what it really is— a negative which, though it would fain 
 assert itself, has no real persistence, and is, in fact, only the 
 absolute sham-existence of negativity in itself. 
 
 36.] The fourth branch of metaphysics is Natural or 
 Rational Theology. The notion of God, or God as 
 
72 FIRST ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [36. 
 
 a possible being, the proofs of his existence, and his 
 properties, formed the study of this branch. 
 
 (a) When understanding thus discusses the Deity, 
 its main purpose is to find what predicates correspond 
 or not to the fact we have in our imagination as God. 
 And in so doing it assumes the contrast between posi- 
 tive and negative to be absolute ; and hence, in the long 
 run, nothing is left for the notion as understanding 
 takes it, but the empty abstraction of indeterminate 
 Being, of mere reality or positivity, the lifeless product 
 of modern * Deism.' 
 
 (b) The method of demonstration employed in finite 
 knowledge must always lead to an inversion of the true 
 order. For it requires the statement of some objective 
 ground for God's being, which thus acquires the ap- 
 pearance of being derived from something else. This 
 mode of proof, guided as it is by the canon of mere 
 analytical identity, is embarrassed by the difficulty of 
 passing from the finite to the infinite. Either the finitude 
 of the existing world, which is left as much a fact as it 
 was before, clings to the notion of Deity, and God has 
 to be defined as the immediate substance of that world, 
 — which is Pantheism : or He remains an object set 
 over against the subject, and in this way, finite, — which 
 is Dualism. 
 
 (c) The attributes of God which ought to be various 
 and precise, had, properly speaking, sunk and disap- 
 peared in the abstract notion of pure reality, of indeter- 
 minate Being. Yet in our material thought, the finite 
 world continues, meanwhile, to have a real being, with 
 God as a sort of antithesis : and thus arises the further 
 picture of different relations of God to the world. 
 These, formulated as properties, must, on the one hand, 
 as relations to finite circumstances, themselves possess 
 a finite character (giving us such properties as just, 
 
36.] NATURAL THEOLOGY. 73 
 
 gracious, mighty, wise, &c.) ; on the other hand they 
 must be infinite. Now on this level of thought the 
 only means, and a hazy one, of reconciling these op- 
 posing requirements was quantitative exaltation of the 
 properties^ forcing them into indeterminateness, — into 
 the sensus eminentior. But it was an expedient which 
 really destroyed the property and left a mere name. 
 
 The object of the old metaphysical theology was to see 
 how far unassisted reason could go in the knowledge of 
 God. Certainly a reason-derived knowledge of God is the 
 highest problem of philosophy. The earliest teachings of 
 religion are figurate conceptions of God. These concep- 
 tions, as the Creed arranges them, are imparted to us in 
 youth. They are the doctrines of our religion, and in so far 
 as the individual rests his faith on these doctrines and feels 
 them to be the truth, he has all he needs as a Christian. 
 Such is faith : and the science of this faith is Theology. 
 But until Theology is something more than a bare enumera- 
 tion and compilation of these doctrines ab extra, it has no 
 right to the title of science. Even the method so much in 
 vogue at present— the purely historical mode of treatment— 
 which for example reports what has been said by this or 
 the other Father of the Church— does not invest theology 
 with a scientific character. To get that, we must go on to 
 comprehend the facts by thought, — which is the business 
 of philosophy. Genuine theology is thus at the same time 
 a real philosophy of religion, as it was, we may add, in the 
 Middle Ages. 
 
 And now let us examine this rational theology more nar- 
 rowly. It was a science which approached God not by 
 reason but by understanding, and, in its mode of thought, 
 employed the terms without any sense of their mutual limi- 
 tations and connexions. The notion of God formed the 
 subject of discussion ; and yet the criterion of our know- 
 ledge was derived from such an extraneous source as the 
 materiahsed conception of God. Now thought must be free 
 in its movements. It is no doubt to be remembered, that 
 the result of indei>endent thought harmonises with the im- 
 
74 FIRST ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [36. 
 
 port of the Christian religion :— for the Christian religion is 
 a revelation of reason. But such a harmony surpassed the 
 efforts of rational theology. It proposed to define the figu- 
 rate conception of God in terms of thought ; but it resulted 
 in a notion of God which was what we may call the abstract 
 of positivity or reality, to the exclusion of all negation. 
 God was accordingly defined to be the most real of all 
 beings. Any one can see however that this most real of 
 beings, in which negation forms no part, is the very oppo- 
 site of what it ought to be and of what understanding sup- 
 poses it to be. Instead of being rich and full above all 
 measure, it is so narrowly conceived that it is, on the con- 
 trary, extremely poor and altogether empty. It is with 
 reason that the heart craves a concrete body of truth ; but 
 without definite feature, that is, without negation, contained 
 in the notion, there can only be an abstraction. When the 
 notion of God is apprehended only as that of the abstract or 
 most real being, God is, as it were, relegated to another 
 world beyond : and to speak of a knowledge of him would 
 be meaningless. Where there is no definite quality, know- 
 ledge is impossible. Mere light is mere darkness. 
 
 The second problem of rational theology was to prove the 
 existence of God. Now, in this matter, the main point to be 
 noted is that demonstration, as the understanding employs 
 it, means the dependence of one truth on another. Tn such 
 proofs we have a pre-supposition — something firm and 
 fast, from which something else follows ; we exhibit the de- 
 pendence of some truth from an assumed starting-point. 
 Hence, if this mode of demonstration is applied to the exist- 
 ence of God, it can only mean that the being of God is to 
 depend on other terms, which will then constitute the 
 ground of his being. It is at once evident that this will lead 
 to some mistake : for God must be simply and solely the 
 ground of everything, and in so far not dependent upon 
 anything else. And a perception of this danger has in 
 modern times led some to say that God's existence is not 
 capable of proof, but must be immediately or intuitively 
 apprehended. Reason, however, and even sound common 
 sense give demonstration a meaning quite different from 
 
36.] NATURAL THEOLOGY. 75 
 
 that of the understanding. The demonstration of reason no 
 doubt starts from something which is not God. But, as it 
 advances, it does not leave the starting-point a mere unex- 
 plained fart, which is what it was. On the contrary it exhibits 
 that point as derivative and called into being, and then God 
 is seen to be primary, truly immediate and self-subsisting, 
 with the means of derivation wrapt up and absorbed in him- 
 self. Those who say : ' Consider Nature, and Nature will 
 lead you to God ; you will find an absolute final cause : ' do 
 not mean that God is something derivative : they mean that 
 it is we who proceed to God himself from another ; and in 
 this way God, though the consequence, is also the absolute 
 ground of the initial step. The relation of the two things is 
 reversed ; and what came as a consequence, being shown to 
 be an antecedent, the original antecedent is reduced to a 
 consequence. This is always the way, moreover, whenever 
 reason demonstrates. 
 
 If in the light of the present discussion we cast one glance 
 more on the metaphysical method as a whoje, we find its 
 main characteristic was to make abstract identity its prin- 
 ciple and to try to apprehend the objects of reason by the 
 abstract and finite categories of the understanding. But 
 this infinite of the understanding, this pure essence, is still 
 finite : it has excluded all the variety of particular things, 
 which thus limit and deny it. Instead of winning a con- 
 crete, this metaphysic stuck fast on an abstract, identity. 
 Its good point was the perception that thought alone con- 
 stitutes the essence of all that is. It derived its materials 
 from earlier philosophers, particularly the Schoolmen. In 
 speculative philosophy the understanding undoubtedly forms 
 a stage, but not a stage at which we should keep for ever 
 standing. Plato is no metaphysician of this imperfect 
 type, still less Aristotle, although the contrary is generally 
 believed. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 SECOND ATTITUDE OF THOUGHT TO OBJECTIVITY. 
 
 I, Empiricism. 
 
 37.] Under these circumstances a double want began 
 to be felt. Partly it was the need of a concrete subject- 
 matter, as a counterpoise to the abstract theories of the 
 understanding, which is unable to advance unaided 
 from its generalities to specialisation and determination. 
 Partly, too, it was the demand for something fixed and 
 secure, so as to exclude the possibihty of proving any- 
 thing and everything in the sphere, and according to 
 the method, of the finite formulae of thought. Such was 
 the genesis of Empirical philosophy, which abandons 
 the search for truth in thought itself, and goes to fetch 
 it from Experience, the outward and the inward present. 
 
 The rise of Empiricism is due to the need thvxs stated of 
 concrete contents, and a firm footing— needs which the ab- 
 stract metaphysic of the understanding failed to satisfy. 
 Now by concreteness of contents it is meant that we must 
 know the objects of consciousness as intrinsically determinate 
 and as the unity of distinct characteristics. But, as we have 
 already seen, this is by no means the case v/ith the meta- 
 physic of understanding, if it conform to its principle. With 
 the mere understanding, thinking is limited to the form of 
 an abstract universal, and can never advance to the particu- 
 larisation of this universal. Thus we find the metaphysicians 
 engaged in an attempt to elicit by the instrumentality of 
 
37-38.] EMPIRICISM. 77 
 
 thought, what was the essence or fundamental attribute of 
 the Soul. The Soul, they said, is simple. The simplicity 
 thus ascribed to the Soul meant a mere and utter simplicity, 
 from which difference is excluded : difference, or in other 
 words composition, being made the fundamental attribute 
 of body, or of matter in general. Clearly, in simplicity of 
 this narrow type we have a very shallow category, quite in- 
 capable of embracing the wealth of the soul or of the mind. 
 When it thus appeared that abstract metaphysical thinking 
 was inadequate, it was felt that resource must be had to 
 empirical psychology. The same happened in the case of 
 Rational Physics. The current phrases there were, for 
 instance, that space is infinite, that Nature makes no leap, &c. 
 Evidently this phraseology was wholly unsatisfactory in 
 presence of the plenitude and life of nature. 
 
 38.] To some extent this source from which Empiri- 
 cism draws is common to it with metaphysic. It is in 
 our materialised conceptions, i.e. in facts which emanate, 
 in the first instance, from experience, that metaphysic 
 also finds the guarantee for the correctness of its defini- 
 tions (including both its initial assumptions and its more 
 detailed body of doctrine). But, on the other hand, it 
 must be noted that the single sensation is not the same 
 thing as experience, and that the Empirical School 
 elevates the facts included under sensation, feeling, and 
 perception into the form of general ideas, propositions 
 or laws. This, however, it does with the reservation 
 that these general principles (such as force), are to have 
 no further import or validity of their own beyond that 
 taken from the sense-impression, and that no connexion 
 shall be deemed legitimate except what can be shown to 
 exist in phenomena. And on the subjective side Em- 
 pirical cognition has its stable footing in the fact that in 
 a sensation consciousness is directly present and certain 
 of itself. 
 
 In Empiricism lies the great principle that whatever 
 
78 SECOND ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [38. 
 
 is true must be in the actual world and present to sen- 
 sation. This principle contradicts that ' ought to be ' 
 on the strength of which ' reflection * is vain enough to 
 treat the actual present with scorn and to point to a 
 scene beyond — a scene which is assumed to have place 
 and being only in the understanding of those who talk of 
 it. No less than Empiricism, philosophy (§ 7) recognises 
 only what is, and has nothing to do with what merely 
 ought to be and what is thus confessed not to exist. 
 On the subjective side, too, it is right to notice the 
 valuable principle of freedom involved in Empiricism. 
 For the main lesson of Empiricism is that man must see 
 for himself and feel that he is present in every fact of 
 knowledge which he has to accept. 
 
 When it is carried out to its legitimate consequences, 
 Empiricism— being in its facts limited to the finite 
 sphere — denies the super-sensibie in general, or at 
 least any knowledge of it which would define its nature ; 
 it leaves thought no powers except abstraction and 
 formal universality and identity. But there is a funda- 
 mental delusion in all scientific empiricism. It employs 
 the metaphysical categories of matter, force, those of 
 one, many, generality, infinity, &c. ; following the clue 
 given by these categories it proceeds to draw conclu- 
 sions, and in so doing pre-supposes and applies the 
 syllogistic form. And all the while it is unaware that it 
 contains metaphysics — in wielding which, it makes use 
 of those categories and their combinations in a style 
 utterly thoughtless and uncritical. 
 
 From Empiricism came the cry : ' Stop roaming in empty 
 abstractions, keep your eyes open, lay hold on man and 
 nature as they are here before you, enjoy the present 
 moment.' Nobody can deny that there is a good deal of 
 truth in these words. The every-day world, what is here 
 and now, was a good exchange for the futile other-world 
 
38.] EMPIRICISM. 79 
 
 — for the mirages and the chimeras of the abstract under- 
 standing. And thus was acquired an infinite principle, — that 
 solid footing so much missed in the old metaphysic. Finite 
 principles are the most that the understanding can pick out 
 — and these being essentially unstable and tottering, the 
 structure they supported must collapse with a crash. 
 Always the instinct of reason was to find an infinite 
 principle. As yet, the time had not come for finding it in 
 thought. Hence, this instinct seized upon the present, the 
 Here, the This,— where doubtless there is implicit infinite 
 form, but not in the genuine existence of that form. The 
 external world is the truth, if it could but know it: for the 
 truth is actual and must exist. The infinite principle, the 
 self-centred truth, therefore, is in the world for reason to 
 discover: though it exists in an individual and sensible 
 shape, and not in its truth. 
 
 Besides, this school makes sense-perception the form in 
 which fact is to be apprehended : and in this consists 
 the defect of Empiricism. Sense-perception as such is 
 always individual, alwa3'S transient : not indeed that the pro- 
 cess of knowledge stops short at sensation : on the contrary, 
 it proceeds to find out the universal and permanent element 
 in the individual apprehended by sense. This is the pro- 
 cess leading from simple perception to experience. 
 
 In order to form experiences, Empiricism makes especial 
 use of the form of Analysis. In the impression of sense we 
 have a concrete of many elements, the several attributes 
 of which we are expected to peel oft' one by one, like the 
 coats of an onion. In thus dismembering the thing, it is 
 understood that we disintegrate and take to pieces these 
 attributes which have coalesced, and add nothing but our 
 own act of disintegration. Yet analysis is the process from 
 the immediacy of sensation to thought : those attributes, 
 which the object analysed contains in union, acquire the 
 form of universality by being separated. Empiricism there- 
 fore labours under a delusion, if it supposes that, while 
 analysing the objects, it leaves them as they were : it really 
 transforms the concrete into an abstract. And as a conse- 
 quence of this change the living thing is killed: life can 
 
8o SECOND ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [38. 
 
 exist only in the concrete and one. Not that we can do 
 without this division, if it be our intention to comprehend. 
 Mind itself is an inherent division. The error lies in for- 
 getting that this is only one-half of the process, and that the 
 main point is the re-union of what has been parted. And it 
 is where analysis never gets beyond the stage of partition 
 that the words of the poet are true : 
 
 * Encheiresin Naturae nennt'g bie (Sfiemie, 
 
 <S^)cttet i^rcc felbft, unb tceif nid^t, »oic: 
 
 §at bie %\)nU in itircr ^anb, 
 
 ge'^It feiber luir bag flcijitge S3anb.' 
 Analysis starts from the concrete ; and the possession of 
 this material gives it a considerable advantage over the 
 abstract thinking of the old metaphysics. It establishes the 
 differences in things : and this is very important : but these 
 very differences are nothing after all but abstract attributes, 
 i. e. thoughts. These thoughts, it is assumed, contain the 
 real essence of the objects ; and thus once more we see the 
 axiom of bygone metaphysics reappear, that the truth of 
 things lies in thought. 
 
 Let us next compare the empirical theory with that of 
 metaphysics in the matter of their respective contents. We 
 find the latter, as already stated, taking for its theme the 
 universal objects of the reason, viz. God, the Soul, and the 
 World : and these themes, accepted from popular conception, 
 it was the problem of philosophy to reduce into the form of 
 thoughts. Another specimen of the same method was the 
 Scholastic philosophy, the theme pre-supposed by which 
 was formed by the dogmas of the Christian Church : and it 
 aimed at fixing their meaning and giving them a systematic 
 arrangement through thought— The facts on which Empiri- 
 cism is based are of entirely different kind. They are the 
 sensible facts of nature and the facts of the finite mind. In 
 other words, Empiricism deals with a finite material— and 
 the old metaphysicians had an infinite, — though, let us add, 
 they made this infinite content finite by the finite form of 
 the understanding. The same finitude of form reappears in 
 Empiricism— but here the facts are finite also. To this ex- 
 tent, then, both modes of philosophising have the same 
 
38-39-] EMPIRICISM. 8l 
 
 method ; both proceed from data or assumptions, which 
 they accept as ultimate. Generally speaking, Empiricism 
 finds the truth in the outward world ; and even if it allow a 
 super-sensible world, it holds knowledge of that world to be 
 impossible, and would restrict us to the province of sense- 
 perception. This doctrine when systematically carried out 
 produces what has been latterly termed Materiahsm. 
 Materialism of this stamp looks upon matter, qua matter, 
 as the genuine objective world. But with matter we are 
 at once introduced to an abstraction, which as such cannot 
 be perceived : and it may be maintained that there is no 
 matter, because, as it exists, it is always something definite 
 and concrete. Yet the abstraction we term matter is sup- 
 posed to lie at the basis of the whole world of sense, and 
 expresses the sense-world in its simplest terms as out-and- 
 out individualisation, and hence a congeries of points in 
 mutual exclusion. So long then as this sensible sphere is 
 and continues to be for Empiricism a mere datum, we have 
 a doctrine of bondage : for we become free, when we are 
 confronted by no absolutely alien world, but depend upon 
 a fact which we ourselves are. Consistently with the 
 empirical point of view, besides, reason and unreason can 
 only be subjective : in other words, we must take what is 
 given just as it is, and we have no right to ask whether and 
 to what extent it is rational in its own nature. 
 
 39.] Touching this principle it has been justly ob- 
 served that in what we call Experience, as distinct 
 from mere single perception of single facts, there are 
 two elements. The one is the matter, infinite in its 
 multiplicity, and as it stands a mere set of singular^ : 
 the other is the form, the characteristics of universality 
 and necessity. Mere experience no doubt offers many, 
 perhaps innumerable cases of similar perceptions : but, 
 after all, no multitude, however great, can be the same 
 thing as universality. Similarly, mere experience 
 affords perceptions of changes succeeding each other 
 and of objects in juxtaposition ; but it presents no 
 
 VOL. II. G 
 
82 SECOND ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [39-40. 
 
 necessary connexion. If perception, therefore, is to 
 maintain its claim to be the sole basis of what men hold 
 for truth, universality and necessity appear something 
 illegitimate : they become an accident of our minds, 
 a mere custom, the content of which might be otherwise 
 constituted than it is. 
 
 It is an important corollary of this theory, that on 
 this empirical mode of treatment legal and ethical prin- 
 ciples and laws, as well as the truths of religion, are 
 exhibited as the work of chance, and stripped of their 
 objective character and inner truth. 
 
 The scepticism of Hume, to which this conclusion 
 was chiefly due, should be clearly marked off from 
 Greek scepticism. Hume assumes the truth of the 
 empirical element, feeling and sensation, and proceeds 
 to challenge universal principles and laws, because they 
 have no warranty from sense-perception. So far was 
 ancient scepticism from making feeling and sensation 
 the canon of truth, that it turned against the deliverances 
 of sense first of all, (On Modern Scepticism as com- 
 pared with Ancient, see Schelling and Hegel's Critical 
 Journal of Philosophy : 1802, vol. I. i.) 
 
 II. The Critical Philosophy. 
 
 40.] In common with Empiricism the Critical Philo- 
 sophy assumes that experience affords the one sole 
 foundation for cognitions ; which however it does not 
 allow to rank as truths, but only as knowledge of 
 phenomena. 
 
 The Critical theory starts originally from the distinc- 
 tion of elements presented in the analysis of experience, 
 viz. the matter of sense, and its universal relations. 
 Taking into account Hume's criticism on this distinction 
 
40-4I.] THE •CRITICAL' PHILOSOPHY. 83 
 
 as given in the preceding section, viz. that sensation 
 does not expHcitly apprehend more than an individual 
 or more than a mere event, it insists at the same time 
 on the fact tha't universahty and necessity are seen to 
 perform a function equally essential in constituting what 
 is called experience. This element, not being derived 
 from the empirical facts as such, must belong to the 
 spontaneity of thought ; in other words, it is a priori. 
 The Categories or Notions of the Understanding con- 
 stitute the objectivity of experiential cognitions. In 
 every case they involve a connective reference, and 
 hence through their means are formed synthetic judg- 
 ments a priori, that is, primary and underivative con- 
 nexions of opporites. 
 
 Even Hume's scepticism does not deny that the 
 characteristics of universality and necessity are found in 
 cognition. And even in Kant this fact remains a pre- 
 supposition after all ; it may be said, to use the ordinary 
 phraseology of the sciences, that Kant did no more than 
 offer another explanation of the fact. 
 
 41.] The Critical Philosophy proceeds to test the 
 value of the categories employed in metaphysic, as well 
 as in other sciences and in ordinary conception. This 
 scrutiny however is not directed to the content of these 
 categories, nor does it inquire into the exact relation 
 they bear to one another : but simply considers them as 
 affected by the contrast between subjective and objec- 
 tive. The contrast, as we are to understand it here, 
 bears upon the distinction (see preceding §) of the two 
 elements in experience. The name of objectivity is 
 here given to the element of universality and necessity, 
 i.e. to the categories themselves, or what is called the 
 a priori constituent. The Critical Philosophy however 
 widened the contrast in such away, that the subjectivity 
 comes to embrace the ensemble of experience, including 
 
 G 2 
 
84 SECOND ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [41. 
 
 both of the aforesaid elements ; and nothing remains on 
 the other side but the * thing-in-itself.' 
 
 The special forms of the a priori element, in other 
 words, of thought, which in spite of its objectivity is 
 looked upon as a purely subjective act, present them- 
 selves as follows in a systematic order which, it may be 
 remarked, is solely based upon psychological and his- 
 torical grounds. 
 
 (i) A very important step was undoubtedly made, when 
 the terms of the old metaphysic were subjected to scrutiny. 
 The plain thinker pursued his unsuspecting way in those 
 categories which had offered themselves naturally. It never 
 occurred to him to ask to what extent these categories had 
 a value and authority of their own. If, as has been said, 
 it is characteristic of free thought to allow no assumptions 
 to pass unquestioned, the old metaphysicians were not 
 free thinkers. They accepted their categories as they 
 were, without further trouble, as an a priori datum, not yet 
 tested by reflection. The Critical philosophy reversed this. 
 Kant undertook to examine how far the forms of thought 
 were capable of leading to the knowledge of truth. In 
 particular he demanded a criticism of the faculty of cogni- 
 tion as preliminary to its exercise. That is a fair demand, 
 if it mean that even the forms of thought must be made an 
 object of investigation. Unfortunately there soon creeps in 
 the misconception of already knowing before you know,— 
 the error of refusing to enter the water until you have 
 learnt, to swim. True, indeed, the forms of thought should 
 be subjected to a scrutiny before they are used : yet what is 
 this scrutiny but ipso facto a cognition? So that what we 
 want is to combine in our process of inquiry the acdon of 
 the forms of thought with a criticism of them. The forms 
 of thought must be studied in their essential nature and 
 complete development : they are at once the object of 
 research and the action of that object. Hence they examine 
 themselves : in their own action they must determine their 
 limits, and point out their defects. This is that action of 
 thought, which will hereafter be specially considered under 
 
41.] kant's problem. 85 
 
 the name of Dialectic, and regarding which we need only 
 at the outset observe that, instead of being brought to bear 
 upon the categories from without, it is immanent in their 
 own action. 
 
 We may therefore state the first point in Kant's philo- 
 sophy as follows : Thought must itself investigate its own 
 capacity of knowledge. People in the present day have 
 got over Kant and his philosophy : everybody wants to get 
 further. But there are tvyo ways of going further — a back- 
 ward and a forward. The light of criticism soon shows that 
 many of our modern essays in philosophy are mere repeti- 
 tions of the old metaphysical method, an endless and un- 
 critical thinking in a groove determined by the natural bent 
 of each man's mind. 
 
 (2) Kant's examination of the categories suffers from the 
 grave defect of viewing them, not absolutely and for their 
 own sake, but in order to see whether they are subjective or 
 objective. In the language of common life we mean by 
 objective what exists outside of us and reaches us from with- 
 out by means of sensation. What Kant did, was to deny 
 that the categories, such as cause and effect, were, in this 
 sense of the word, objective, or given in sensation, and to 
 maintain on the contrary that they belonged to our own 
 thought itself, to the spontaneity of thought. To that extent 
 therefore, they were subjective. And yet in spite of tJiis, 
 Kant gives the name objective to what is thought, to the 
 universal and necessary, while he describes as subjective 
 whatever is merely felt. This arrangement apparently 
 reverses the first-mentioned use of the word, and has 
 caused Kant to be charged with confusing language. But 
 the charge is unfair if we more narrowly consider the 
 facts of the case. The vulgar believe that the objects of 
 perception which confront them, such as an individual 
 animal, or a single star, are independent and permanent 
 existences, compared with which, thoughts are unsubstantial 
 and dependent on something else. In fact however the 
 perceptions of sense are the properly dependent and 
 secondary feature, while the thoughts are really inde- 
 pendent and primary. This being so, Kant gave the title 
 
86 SECOND ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [41-42. 
 
 objective to the intellectual factor, to the universal and 
 necessary : and he was quite justified in so doing. Our 
 sensations on the other hand are subjective ; for sensations 
 lack stability in their owji nature, and are no less fleeting 
 and evanescent than thought is permanent and self-subsist- 
 ing. At the present day, the special line of distinction 
 established by Kant between the subjective and objective 
 is adopted by the phraseology of the educated world. Thus 
 the criticism of a work of art ought, it is said, to be not 
 subjective, but objective ; in other words, instead of springing 
 from the particular and accidental feeling or temper of the 
 moment, it should keep its eye on those general points of 
 view which the laws of art establish. In the same acceptation 
 we can distinguish in any scientific pursuit the objective and 
 the subjective interest of the investigation. 
 
 But after all, objectivity of thought, in Kant's sense, is 
 again to a certain extent subjective. Thoughts, according to 
 Kant, although universal and necessary categories, are only 
 our thoughts— separated by an impassable gulf from the 
 thing, as it exists apart from our knowledge. But the true 
 objectivity of thinking means that the thoughts, far from 
 being merely ours, must at the same time be the real essence 
 of the things, and of whatever is an object to us. 
 
 Objective and subjective are convenient expressions in 
 current use, the employment of which may easily lead to 
 confusion. Up to this point, the discussion has shown three 
 meanings of objectivity. First, it means what has external 
 existence, in distinction from which the subjective is what 
 is only supposed, dreamed, &c. Secondly, it has the mean- 
 ing, attached to it by Kant, of the universal and necessary, 
 as distinguished from the particular, subjective and occasional 
 element which belongs to our sensations. Thirdly, as has been 
 just explained, it means the thought-apprehended essence of 
 the existing thing, in contradistinction from what is merely 
 our thought, and what consequently is still separated from 
 the thing itself, as it exists in independent essence. 
 
 42.] [a) The Theoretical Faculty. — Cognition qua 
 cognition. The specific ground of the categories is 
 declared by the CriticaJ system to lie in the primary 
 
42.] THE CATEGORIES AND THEIR PRINCIPLE. 87 
 
 identity of the ' I ' in thought, — what Kant calls the 
 ' transcendental unity of self-consciousness.' The im- 
 pressions from feeling and perception are, if we look to 
 their contents, a multiplicity or miscellan}' of elements : 
 and the multiplicity is equally conspicuous in their form. 
 For sense is marked by a mutual exclusion of members ; 
 and that under two aspects, namely space and time, 
 which, being the forms, that is to say, the universal type 
 of perception, are themselves a priori. This congeries, 
 afforded by sensation and perception, must however 
 be reduced to an identity or primary synthesis. To 
 accomplish this the ' I ' brings it in relation to itself and 
 unites it there in one consciousness which Kant calls 
 ' pure apperception.' The specific modes in which the 
 Ego refers to itself the multiplicity of sense are the pure 
 concepts of the understanding, the Categories. 
 
 Kant, it is well known, did not put himself to much 
 trouble in discovering the categories. ' I,' the unity of 
 self-consciousness, being quite abstract and completely 
 indeterminate, the question arises, how are we to get at 
 the specialised forms of the ' I,' the categories ? Fortu- 
 nately, the common logic offers to our hand an empirical 
 classification of the kinds oi judgment. Now, to judge 
 is the same as to think of a determinate object. Hence 
 the various modes of judgment, as enumerated to our 
 hand, provide us with the several categories of thought. 
 To the philosophy of Fichte belongs the great merit of 
 having called attention to the need of exhibiting the 
 necessity of these categories and giving a genuine deduc- 
 tion of them. Fichte ought to have produced at least 
 one effect on the method of logic. One might have 
 expected that the general laws of thought, the usual 
 stock-in-trade of logicians, or the classification of no- 
 tions, judgments, and syllogisms, would be no longer 
 taken merely from observation and so only empirically 
 
88 SECOND ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [42. 
 
 treated, but be deduced from thought itself. If thought 
 is to be capable of proving anything at all, if logic must 
 insist upon the necessity of proofs, and if it proposes to 
 teach the theory of demonstration, its first care should 
 be to give a reason for its own subject-matter, and to 
 see that it is necessary. 
 
 (i) Kant therefore holds that the categories have their 
 source in the ' Ego,' and that the ' Ego ' consequently sup- 
 plies the characteristics of universality and necessity. If 
 we observe what we have before us primarily, we may de- 
 scribe it as a congeries or diversity : and in the categories 
 we find the simple points or units, to which this congeries 
 is made to converge. The world of sense is a scene of 
 mutual exclusion : its being is outside itself. That is the 
 fundamental feature of the sensible. 'Now 'has no mean- 
 ing except in reference to a before and a hereafter. Red, 
 in the same way, only subsists by being opposed to yellow 
 and blue. Now this other thing is outside the sensible ; 
 which latter is, only in so far as it is not the other, and only 
 in so far as that other is. But thought, or the ' Ego,' occu- 
 pies a position the very reverse of the sensible, with its 
 mutual exclufi' ns, and its being outside itself. The ' I ' is 
 the primary identity — at one with itself and all at home in 
 itself The word ' I ' expresses the mere act of bringing-to- 
 bear-upon-self : and whatever is placed in this unit or focus, 
 is aflfected by it and transformed into it. The ' I' is as it 
 were the crucible and the fire which consumes the loose 
 plurality of sense and reduces it to unity. This is the pro- 
 cess which Kant calls pure apperception in distinction from 
 the common apperception, to which the plurality it receives 
 is a plurality still ; whereas pure apperception is rather an 
 act by which the ' I ' makes the materials ' mine.' 
 
 This view has at least the merit of giving a correct ex- 
 pression to the nature of all consciousness. The tendency of 
 all man's endeavours is to understand the world, to appro- 
 priate and subdue it to himself: and to this end the positive 
 reality of the world must be as it were crushed and pounded, 
 in other words, idealised. At the same time we must note 
 
42.] THE TRANSCENDENTAL UNITY 89 
 
 that it is not the mere act of our personal self-consciousness, 
 which introduces an absolute unity into the variety of sense. 
 Rather, this identity is itself the absolute. The absolute 
 is, as it were, so kind as to leave individual things to their 
 own enjoyment, and it again drives them back to the abso- 
 lute unity. 
 
 (2) Expressions like 'transcendental unity of self-con- 
 sciousness ' have an ugly look about them, and suggest a 
 monster in the background : but their meaning is not so 
 abstruse as it looks. Kant's meaning of transcendental may 
 be gathered by the way he distinguishes it from transcen- 
 dent. The transcendent may be said to be what steps out 
 beyond the categories of the understanding : a sense in 
 which the term is first employed in mathematics. Thus in 
 geometry you are told to conceive the circumference of a 
 circle as formed of an infinite number of infinitely small 
 straight lines. In other words, characteristics which the un- 
 derstanding holds to be totally diff'erent, the straight line and 
 the curve, are expressly invested with identity. Another 
 transcendent of the same kind is the self-consciousness 
 which is identical with itself and infinite in itself, as distin- 
 guished from the ordinary consciousness which derives its 
 form and tone from finite materials. That unity of self- 
 consciousness, however, Kant called transcendental only; 
 and he meant thereby that the unity was only in our minds 
 and did not attach to the objects apart from our knowledge 
 of them. 
 
 (3) To regard the categories as subjective only, i.e. as a 
 part of ourselves, must seem very odd to the natural mind ; 
 and no doubt there is something queer about it. It is quite 
 true however that the categories are not contained in the 
 sensation as it is given us. When, for instance, we look at 
 a piece of sugar, we find it is hard, white, sweet, &c. All 
 these properties we say are united in one object. Now it is 
 this unity that is not found in the sensation. The same 
 thing happens if we conceive two events to stand in the 
 relation of cause and effect. The senses only inform us 
 of the two several occurrences which follow each other in 
 time. But that the one is cause,, the other effect,— in other 
 
90 SECOND ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [42-43. 
 
 words, the causal nexus between the two, — is not perceived 
 by sense ; it is only evident to thought. Still, though the 
 categories, such as unity, or cause and effect, are strictly 
 the property of thought, it by no means follows that they 
 must be ours merely and not also characteristics of the 
 objects. Kant however confines them to the subject-mind, 
 and his philosophy may be styled subjective idealism : for 
 he holds that both the form and the matter of knowledge 
 are supplied by the Ego— or knowing subject— the form by 
 our intellectual, the matter by our sentient ego. 
 
 So far as regards the content of this subjective idealism, 
 not a word need be wasted. It might perhaps at first sight 
 be imagined, that objects would lose their reahty when 
 their unity was transferred to the subject. But neither we 
 nor the objects would have anything to gain by the mere 
 fact that they possessed being. The main point is not, that 
 they are, but what they are, and whether or not their con- 
 tent is true. It does no good to the things to say merely 
 that they have being. What has being, will also cease to be 
 when time creeps over it. It might also be alleged that 
 subjective ideahsm tended to promote self-conceit. But 
 surely if a man's world be the sum of his sensible pei:cep- 
 tions, he has no reason to be vain of such a world. Laying 
 aside therefore as unimportant this distinction between sub- 
 jective and objective, we are chiefly interested in knowing 
 what a thing is : i.e. its content, which is no more objective 
 than it is subjective. If mere existence be enough to make 
 objectivity, even a crime is objective : but it is an existence 
 which is nullity at the core, as is definitely made apparent 
 when the day of punishment comes. 
 
 43.] The Categories may be viewed in two aspects. 
 On the one hand it is by their instrumentality that the 
 mere perception of sense rises to objectivity and ex- 
 perience. On the other hand these notions are unities 
 in our consciousness merely : they are consequently 
 conditioned by the material given to them, and having 
 nothing of their own they can be applied to use only 
 within the range of experience. But the other con- 
 
43-44-] SUBJECTIVE IDEALISM. 9T 
 
 stituent of experience, the impressions of feeling and 
 perception, is not one whit less subjective than the 
 categories. 
 
 To assert that the categories taken by themselves a'-e empty 
 can scarcely be right, seeing that they have a content, at all 
 events, in the special stamp and significance which they pos- 
 sess. Of course the content of the categories is not percep- 
 tible to the senses, nor is it in time and space : but that is 
 rather a merit than a defect. A glimpse of this meaning of 
 content may be observed to affect our ordinary thinking. A 
 book or a speech for example is said to have a great deal in 
 it, to be full of content, in proportion to the greater number 
 of thoughts and general results to be found in it : whilst, 
 on the contrary, we should never say that any book, e.g. a 
 novel, had much in it, because it included a great number of 
 single incidents, situations, and the like. Even the popular 
 voice thus recognises that something more than the facts of 
 sense is needed to make a work pregnant with matter. 
 And what is this additional desideratum but thoughts, or in 
 the first instance the categories? And yet it is not alto- 
 gether wrong, it should be added, to call the categories of 
 themselves empty, if it be meant that they and the logical 
 Idea, of which they are the members, do not constitute the 
 whole of philosophy, but necessarily lead onwards in due 
 progress to the real departments of Nature and Mind. Only 
 let the progress not be misunderstood. The logical Idea 
 does not thereby come into possession of a content origin- 
 ally foreign to it : but by its own native action is specialised 
 and developed to Nature and Mind. 
 
 44.] It follows that the categories are no fit terms to 
 express the Absolute — the Absolute not being given in 
 perception; — and Understanding, or knowledge by 
 means of the categories, is consequently incapable of 
 knowing the Things-in-themselves. 
 
 The Thing-in-itself (and under 'thing' is embraced 
 even Mind and God) expresses the object when we 
 leave out of sight all that consciousness makes of it, all 
 
92 SECOND ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [44-45- 
 
 its emotional aspects, and all specific thoughts of it. It 
 is easy to see what is left, — utter abstraction, total 
 emptiness, only described still as an 'other-world' — the 
 negative of every image, feeling, and definite thought. 
 Nor does it require much penetration to see that this 
 caput moriuum is still only a product of thought, such as 
 accrues when thought is carried on to abstraction un- 
 alloyed : that it is the work of the empty ' Ego,' which 
 makes an object out of this empty self identity of its 
 own. The negative characteristic which this abstract 
 identity receives as an object, is also enumerated among 
 the categories of Kant, and is no less familiar than the 
 empty identity aforesaid. Hence one can only read 
 with surprise the perpetual remark that we do not know 
 the Thing-in-itself On the contrary there is nothing 
 we can know so easily. 
 
 45.] It is Reason, the faculty of the Unconditioned, 
 which discovers the conditioned nature of the know- 
 ledge comprised in experience. What is thus called 
 the object of Reason, the Infinite or Unconditioned, is 
 nothing but selfsameness, or the primary identity of 
 the ' Ego ' in thought (mentioned in § 42). Reason 
 itself is the name given to the abstract 'Ego' or thought, 
 which makes this pure identity its aim or object (cf note 
 to the preceding §). Now this identity, having no 
 definite attribute at all, can receive no illumination from 
 the truths of experience, for the reason that these refer 
 always to definite facts. Such is the sort of Uncon- 
 ditioned that is supposed to be the absolute truth of 
 Reason, — what is termed the Idea ; whilst the cognitions 
 of experience are reduced to the level of untruth and 
 declared to be appearances. 
 
 Kant was the first definitely to signalise the distinction be- 
 tween Reason and Understanding. The object of the former, 
 as he applied the term, was the infinite and unconditioned, of 
 
45-] SUBJECTIVE IDEALISM. 93 
 
 the latter the finite and conditioned. Kant did valuable ser- 
 vice when he enforced the finite character of the cognitions 
 of the understanding founded merely upon experience, and 
 stamped their contents with the name of appearance. But 
 his mistake was to stop at the purely negative point of view, 
 and to limit the unconditionality of Reason to an abstract 
 self-sameness without any shade of distinction. It degrades 
 Reason to a finite and conditioned thing, to identify it with 
 a mere stepping beyond the finite and conditioned range of 
 understanding. The real infinite, far from being a mere 
 transcendence of the finite, always involves the absorption 
 of the finite into its own fuller nature. In the same way 
 Kant restored the Idea to its proper dignity : vindicating it 
 for Reason, as a thing distinct from abstract analytic deter- 
 minations or from the merely sensible conceptions which 
 usually appropriate to themselves the name of ideas. But 
 as respects the Idea also, he never got beyond its negative 
 aspect, as what ought to be but is not. 
 
 The view that the objects of immediate consciousness, 
 which constitute the body of experience, are mere appear- 
 ances (phenomena), was another important result of the 
 Kantian philosophy. Common Sense, that mixture of sense 
 and understanding, believes the objects of which it has 
 knowledge to be severally independent and self-supporting ; 
 and when it becomes evident that they tend towards and 
 limit one another, the interdependence of one upon another is 
 reckoned something foreign to them and to their true nature. 
 The very opposite is the truth. The things immediately 
 known are mere appearances— in other words, the ground 
 of their being is not in themselves but in something else. 
 But then comes the important step of defining what this 
 something else is. According to Kant, the things that we 
 know about are to us appearances only, and we can never 
 know their essential nature, which belongs to another 
 world we cannot approach. Plain minds have not unreason- 
 ably taken exception to this subjective idealism, with its 
 reduction of the facts of consciousness to a purely personal 
 world, created by ourselves alone. For the true statement 
 of the case is rather as follows. The things of which we 
 
94 SECOND ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [45-46. 
 
 have direct consciousness are mere pl:enomena, not for us 
 only, but in their own nature ; and the true and proper case 
 of these things, finite as they are, is to have their existence 
 founded not in themselves but in the universal divine Idea. 
 This view of things, it is true, is as idealist as Kant's ; but 
 in contradistinction to the subjective idealism of the Critical 
 philosophy should be termed absolute idealism. Absolute 
 idealism, however, though it is far in advance of vulgar real- 
 ism, is by no means merely restricted to philosophy. It hes 
 at the root of all rehgion ; for religion too believes the actua' 
 world we see, the sum total of existence, to be created and 
 governed by God. 
 
 46.] But it is not enough simply to indicate the 
 existence of the object of Reason. Curiosity impels us 
 to seek for knowledge of this identity, this empty thing- 
 in-itself. Now knowledge means such an acquaintance 
 with the object as apprehends its distinct and special 
 subject-matter. But such subject-matter involves a 
 complex inter-connexion in the object itself, and sup- 
 plies a ground of connexion with many other objects. 
 In the present case, to express the nature of the features 
 of the Infinite or Thing-in-itself, Reason would have 
 nothing except the categories : and in any endeavour so 
 to employ them Reason becomes over-soaring or ' tran- 
 scendent.' 
 
 Here begins the second stage of the Criticism of 
 Reason — which, as an independent piece of work, is 
 more valuable than the first. The first part, as has been 
 explained above, teaches that the categories originate in 
 the unity of self-consciousness ; that any knowledge 
 which is gained by their means has nothing objective in 
 it, and that the very objectivity claimed for them is only 
 subjective. So far as this goes, the Kantian Criticism 
 presents that 'common' type of idealism known as 
 Subjective Idealism. It asks no CiueSw'ons about the 
 meaning or scope of the categories, but simply considers 
 
46-47-] CRITICISM OF PURE REASON. 95 
 
 the abstract form of subjectivity and objectivity, and that 
 even in such a partial way, that the former aspect, that 
 of subjectivity, is retained as a final and purely affirma- 
 tive term of thought. In the second part, however, 
 when Kant examines the application, as it is called, 
 which Reason makes of the categories in order to 
 know its objects, the content of the categories, at least 
 in some points of view, comes in for discussion : 
 or, at any rate, an opportunity presented itself for a 
 discussion of the question. It is worth while to see 
 what decision Kant arrives at on the subject of meta- 
 physic, as this application of the categories to the 
 unconditioned is called. His method of procedure we 
 shall here briefly state and criticise. 
 
 47.] (o) The first of the unconditioned entities which 
 Kant examines is the Soul (see above, § 34). * In my 
 consciousness,' he says, ' I always find that I (i) am the 
 determining subject : (2) am singular, or abstractly 
 simple : (3) am identical, or one and the same, in all 
 the variety of what I am conscious of: (4) distinguish 
 myself as thinking from all the things outside me.' 
 
 Now the method of the old metaphysic, as Kant cor- 
 rectly states it, consisted in substituting for these state- 
 ments of experience the corresponding categories or 
 metaphysical terms. Thus arise these four new propo- 
 sitions : (a) the SoUl is a substance : {b) it is a simple 
 substance : (c) it is numerically identical at the various 
 periods of existence : [d) it stands in relation to space. 
 
 Kant discusses this translation, and draws attention 
 to the Paralogism or mistake of confounding one kind 
 of truth with another. He points out that empirical 
 attributes have here been replaced by categories : and 
 shows that we are not entitled to argue from the former 
 to the latter, or to put the latter in place of the former. 
 
 This criticism obviously but repeats the observation 
 
96 SECOND ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [47. 
 
 of Hume (§ 39) that the categories as a whole, — ideas of 
 universality and necessity, — are entirely absent from 
 sensation ; and that the empirical fact both in form and 
 contents differs from its intellectual formulation. 
 
 If the purely empirical fact were held to constitute the 
 credentials of the thought, then no doubt it would be 
 indispensable to be able precisely to identify the 'idea' 
 in the 'impression.' 
 
 And in order to make out, in his criticism of the meta- 
 physical psychology, that the soul cannot be described 
 as substantial, simple, self-same, and as maintaining its 
 independence in intercourse with the material world, 
 Kant argues from the single ground, that the several 
 attributes of the soul, which consciousness lets us feel 
 in experience, are not exactly the same attributes as 
 result from the action of thought thereon. But we have 
 seen above, that according to Kant all knowledge, even 
 experience, consists in thinking our impressions — in 
 other words, in transforming into intellectual categories 
 the attributes primarily belonging to sensation. 
 
 Unquestionably one good result of the Kantian criti- 
 cism was that it emancipated mental philosophy from 
 the ' soul-thing,' from the categories, and, consequently, 
 from questions about the simplicity, complexity, materi- 
 ality, &c. of the soul. But even for the common sense 
 of ordinary men, the true point of view, from which the 
 inadmissibility of these forms best appears, will be, not 
 that they are thoughts, but that thoughts of such a stamp 
 neither can nor do contain truth. 
 
 If thought and phenomenon do not perfectly corre- 
 spond to one another, we are free at least to choose 
 which of the two shall be held the defaulter. The 
 Kantian idealism, where it touches on the world of 
 Reason, throws the blame on the thoughts ; saying that 
 the thoughts are defective, as not being exactly fitted to 
 
47-48.] PARALOGISMS OF PSYCHOLOGY. 97 
 
 the sensations and to a mode of mind wholly restricted 
 within the range of sensation, in which as such there 
 are no traces of the presence of these thoughts. But as 
 to the actual content of the thought, no question is 
 raised. 
 
 Paralogisms are a species of unsound syllogism, the 
 especial vice of which consists in employing one and the 
 same word in the two premisses with a different meaning. 
 According to Kant the method adopted by the rational psy- 
 chology of the old metaphysicians, when they assumed that 
 the qualities of the phenomenal soul, as given in experi- 
 ence, formed part of its own real essence, was based upon 
 such a Paralogism. Nor can it be denied that predicates like 
 simplicity, permanence, &c., are inapplicable to the soul. 
 But their unfitness is not due to the ground assigned by 
 Kant, that Reason, by applying them, would exceed its ap- 
 pointed bounds. The true ground is that this style of ab- 
 stract terms is not good enough for the soul, which is very 
 much more than a mere simple or unchangeable sort of 
 thing. And thus, for example, while the soul may be ad- 
 mitted to be simple self-sameness, it is at the same time 
 active and institutes distinctions in its own nature. But 
 whatever is merely or abstractly simple is as such also a 
 mere dead thing. By his polemic against the metaphysic of 
 the past Kant discarded those predicates from the soul or 
 mind. He did well ; but when he came to state his reasons, 
 his failure is apparent. 
 
 48.] ifi) The second unconditioned object is the 
 World (§ 35). In the attempt which reason makes to 
 comprehend the unconditioned nature of the World, it 
 falls into what are called Antinomies. In other words 
 it maintains two opposite propositions about the same 
 object, and in such a way that each of them has to be 
 maintained with equal necessity. From this it follows 
 that the body of cosmical fact, the specific statements 
 descriptive of which run into contradietion, cannot be 
 a self-si.bsistent reality, but only an appearance. The 
 
 VOL. II. H 
 
98 SECOND ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [48. 
 
 explanation offered by Kant alleges that the contradic- 
 tion does not affect the object in its own proper essence, 
 but attaches only to the Reason which seeks to compre- 
 hend it. 
 
 In this way the suggestion was broached that the con- 
 tradiction is occasioned by the subject-matter itself, or by 
 the intrinsic quality of the categories. And to offer the 
 idea that the contradiction introduced into the world 
 of Reason by the categories of Understanding is in- 
 evitable and essential, was to make one of the most 
 important steps in the progress of Modern Philosophy. 
 But the more important the issue thus raised the more 
 trivial was the solution. Its only motive was an excess 
 of tenderness for the things of the world. The blemish 
 of contradiction, it seems, could not be allowed to mar 
 the essence of the world : but there could be no objec- 
 tion to attach it to the thinking Reason, to the essence 
 of mind. Probably nobody will feel disposed to deny 
 that the phenomenal world presents contradictions to 
 the observing mind; meaning by 'phenomenal' the 
 world as it presents itself to the senses and understand- 
 ing, to the subjective mind. But if a comparison is 
 instituted between the essence of the world and the 
 essence of the mind, it does seem strange to hear how 
 calmly and confidently the modest dogma has been ad- 
 vanced by one, and repeated by others, that thought or 
 Reason, and not the World, is the seat of contradiction. 
 It is no escape to turn round and explain that Reason 
 falls into contradiction only by applying the categories. 
 For this application of the categories is maintained to 
 be necessary, and Reason is not supposed to be equipped 
 with any other forms but the categories for the purpose 
 of cognition. But cognition is determining and deter- 
 minate thinking: so that, if Reason be mere empty 
 indeterminate thinking, it thinks nothing. And if in the 
 
48; COSMOLOGY— THE ANTINOMIES. 99 
 
 end Reason be reduced to mere identity without diver- 
 sity (see next §), it will in the end also win a happy 
 release from contradiction at the slight sacrifice of all its 
 facts and contents. 
 
 It may also be noted that his failure to make a more 
 thorough study of Antinomy was one of the reasons why 
 Kant enumerated only four Antinomies. These four 
 attracted his notice, because, as may be seen in his dis- 
 cussion of the so-called Paralogisms of Reason, he 
 assumed the list of the categories as a basis of his argu- 
 ment. Employing what has subsequently become a 
 favourite fashion, he simply put the object under a rubric 
 otherwise ready to hand, instead of deducing its charac- 
 teristics from its notion. Further deficiencies in the 
 treatment of the Antinomies 1 have pointed out, as occa- 
 sion offered, in my 'Science of Logic' Here it will be 
 sufficient to say that the Antinomies are not confined to 
 the four special objects taken from Cosmology : they 
 appear in ail objects of every kind, in all conceptions, 
 notions and Ideas. To be aware of this and to know 
 objects in this property of theirs, makes a vital part in a 
 philosophical theory. For the property thus indicated 
 is what we shall afterwards describe as the Dialectical 
 influence in logic. 
 
 The principles of the metaphysical philosophy gave rise 
 to the belief that, when cognition lapsed into contradictions, 
 it was a mere accidental aberration, due to some subjective 
 mistake in argument and inference. According to Kant, 
 however, thought has a natural tendency to issue in contra- 
 dictions or antinomies, whenever it seeks to apprehend the 
 infinite. We have in the latter part of the above paragraph 
 referred to the philosophical importance of the antinomies of 
 reason, and shown how the recognition of their existence 
 helped largely to get rid of the rigid dogmatism of the meta- 
 physic of understanding, and to direct attention to the Dia- 
 lectical movement of thought. But here too Kant, as we 
 
 H 2 
 
TOO SECOND ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [48. 
 
 must add, never got beyond the negative result that the 
 thing-in-itself is unknowable, and never penetrated to the 
 discovery of what the antinomies really and positively mean. 
 That true and positive meaning of the antinomies is this : 
 that every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed 
 elements. Consequently to know, or, in other words, to 
 comprehend an object is equivalent to being conscious of it 
 as a concrete unity of opposed determinations. The old 
 metaphysic, as we have already seen, when it studied the 
 objects of which it sought a metaphysical knowledge, went 
 to work by applying categories abstractly and to the ex- 
 clusion of their opposites. Kant, on the other hand, tried to 
 prove that the statements, issuing through this method, 
 could be met by other statements of contrary import with 
 equal warrant and equal necessity. In the enumeration of 
 these antinomies he narrowed his ground to the cosmology 
 of the old metaphysical system, and in his discussion made 
 out four antinomies, a number which rests upon the list of 
 the categories. The first antinomy is on the question : 
 Whether we are or are not to think the world limited in 
 space and time. In the second antinomy we have a discus- 
 sion of the dilemma: Matter must be conceived either as 
 endlessly divisible, or as consisting of atoms. The third 
 antinomy bears upon the antithesis of freedom and neces- 
 sity, to such extent as it is embraced in the question, 
 Whether everything in the world must be supposed subject 
 to the condition of causality, or if we can also assume free 
 beings, in other words, absolute initial points of action, in 
 the world. Finally, the fourth antinomy is the dilemma: 
 Either the world as a whole has a cause or it is uncaused. 
 
 The method which Kant follows in discussing these anti- 
 nomies is as follows. He puts the two propositions implied 
 in the dilemma over against each other as thesis and anti- 
 thesis, and seeks to prove both : that is to say he tries to 
 exhibit them as inevitably issuing from reflection on the 
 question. He particularly protests against the charge of 
 being a special pleader and of grounding his reasoning on 
 illusions. Speaking honestly, however, the arguments 
 which Kant offers for his thesis and antithesis are mere 
 
48-49-] COSMOLOGY — THE ANTINOMIES. lOI 
 
 shams of demonstration. The thing to be proved is invari- 
 ably implied in the assumption he starts from, and the 
 speciousness of his proofs is only due to his prolix and 
 apagogic mode of procedure. Yet it was, and still is, a great 
 achievement for the Critical philosophy, when it exhibited 
 these antinomies : for in this way it gave some expression 
 (at first certainly subjective and unexplained) to the actual 
 unity of those categories which are kept persistently sepa- 
 rate by the understanding. The first of the cosmological 
 antinomies, for example, implies a recognition of the doc- 
 trine that space and time present a discrete as well as a 
 continuous aspect : whereas the old metaphysic, laying ex- 
 clusive emphasis on the continuity, had been led to treat the 
 world as unlimited in space and time. It is quite correct to 
 say that we can go beyond every definite space and beyond 
 every definite time : but it is no less correct that space and 
 time are real and actual only when they are defined or 
 specialised into ' here ' and ' now,'— a specialisation which is 
 involved in the very notion of them. The same observa- 
 tions apply to the rest of the antinomies. Take, for example, 
 the antinomy of freedom and necessity. The main gist of it 
 is that freedom and necessity as understood by abstract 
 thinkers are not independently real, as these thinkers 
 suppose, but merely ideal factors (moments) of the true 
 freedom and the true necessity, and that to abstract and 
 isolate either conception is to make it false. 
 
 49.] (y) The third object of the Reason is God (§36): 
 He also must be known and defined in terms of thought. 
 But in comparison with an unalloyed identity, every 
 defining term as such seems to the understanding to be 
 only a limit and a negation : every reality accordingly 
 must be taken as limitless, i.e. undefined. Accordingly 
 God, when He is defined to be the sum of all realities, 
 the most real of beings, turns into a mere abstract. 
 And the only term under which that most real of real 
 things can be defined is that of Being— itself the height 
 of abstraction. These are the two elements, abstract 
 
I02 SECOND ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [49-50- 
 
 identity, on one hand, which is spoken of in this place 
 as the notion ; and Being on the other, — which Reason 
 seeks to unify. And their union is the Ideal of Reason. 
 
 50.] To carry out this unification two ways or two 
 forms are admissible. Either we may begin with Being 
 and proceed to the ahstractimi of Thought : or the 
 movement may begin with the abstraction and end in 
 Being. 
 
 We shall, in the first place, start from Being. But 
 Being, in its natural aspect, presents itself to view as 
 a Being of infinite variety, a World in all its plenitude. 
 And this world may be regarded in two ways : first, as 
 a collection of innumerable unconnected facts ; and 
 second, as a collection of innumerable facts in mutual 
 relation, giving evidence of design. The first aspect is 
 emphasised in the Cosmological proof: the latter in the 
 proofs of Natural Theology. Suppose now that this 
 fulness of being passes under the agency of thought. 
 Then it is stripped of its isolation and unconnectedness, 
 and viewed as a universal and absolutely necessary 
 being which determines itself and acts by general pur- 
 poses or laws. And this necessary and self-determined 
 being, different from the being at the commencement, 
 is God. 
 
 The main force of Kant's criticism on this process 
 attacks it for being a syllogising, i.e. a transition. Per- 
 ceptions, and that aggregate of perceptions we call the 
 world, exhibit as they stand no traces of that univer- 
 sality which they afterwards receive from the purifying 
 act of thought. The empirical conception of the world 
 therefore gives no warrant for the idea of universality. 
 And so any attempt on the part of thought to ascend 
 from the en pirical conception of the world to God is 
 checked by the argument of Hume (as in the para- 
 logisms, § 47), according to which we have no right to 
 
50.] PRINCIPLES OF THEOLOGY. 103 
 
 think sensations, that is, to eUcit universality and neces- 
 sity from them. 
 
 Man is essentially a thinker : and therefore sound 
 Common Sense, as well as Philosophy, will not yield 
 up their right of rising to God from and out of the 
 empirical view of the world. The only basis on which 
 this rise is possible is the thinking study of the world, 
 not the bare sensuous, animal, attuition of it. Thought 
 and thought alone has eyes for the essence, substance, 
 universal power, and ultimate design of the world. 
 And what men call the proofs of God's existence are, 
 rightly understood, ways of describing and analysing the 
 native course of the mind, the course of thought think- 
 ing the data of the senses. The rise of thought beyond 
 the world of sense, its passage from the finite to the 
 infinite, the leap into the super-sensible which it takes 
 when it snaps asunder the chain of sense, all this tran- 
 sition is thought and nothing but thought. Say there 
 must be no such passage, and you say there is to be no 
 thinking. And in sooth, animals make no such transi- 
 tion. They never get further than sensation and the 
 perception of the senses, and in consequence they have 
 no religion. 
 
 Both on general grounds, and in the particular case, 
 there are two remarks to be made upon the criticism of 
 this exaltation in thought. The first remark deals with 
 the question of form. When the exaltation is exhibited 
 in a syllogistic process, in the shape of what we call 
 proofs of the being of God, these reasonings cannot 
 but start from some sort of theory of the world, which 
 makes it an aggregate either of contingent facts or of 
 final causes and relations involving design. The merely 
 syllogistic thinker may deem this starting-point a solid 
 basis and suppose that it remains throughout in the 
 same empirical light, left at last as it was at the first. In 
 
I04 SECOND ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [50. 
 
 this case, the bearing of the beginning upon the con- 
 clusion to which it leads has a purely affirmative aspect, 
 as if we were only reasoning from one thing which is 
 and continues to be, to another thing which in like 
 manner is. But the great error is to restrict our 
 notions of the nature of thought to its form in under- 
 standing alone. To think the phenomenal world rather 
 means to re-cast its form, and transmute it into a uni- 
 versal. And thus the action of thought has also a 
 negative effect upon its basis : and the matter of sensa- 
 tion, when it receives the stamp of universality, at once 
 loses its first and phenomenal shape. By the removal 
 and negation of the shell, the kernel within the sense- 
 percept is brought to the light (§§ 13 and 23). And it is 
 because they do not, with sufficient prominence, express 
 the negative features implied in the exaltation of the 
 mind from the world to God, that the metaphysical 
 proofs of the being of a God are defective interpreta- 
 tions and descriptions of the process. If the world is 
 only a sum of incidents, it follows that it is also deciduous 
 and phenomenal, in esse and posse null. That upward 
 spring of the mind signifies, that the being which the 
 world has is only a semblance, no real being, no abso- 
 lute truth ; it signifies that, beyond and above that 
 appearance, truth abides in God, so that true being is 
 another name for God. The process of exaltation might 
 thus appear to be transition and to involve a means, but 
 it is not a whit less true, that every trace of transition 
 and means is absorbed ; since the world, which might 
 have seemed to be the means of reaching God, is ex- 
 plained to be a nullity. Unless the being of* the world 
 is nullified, the point d'dppui for the exaltation is lost. 
 In this way the apparent means vanishes, and the pro- 
 cess of derivation is cancelled in the very act by which 
 it proceeds. It is the affirmative aspect of this rela- 
 
50.] PRINCIPLES OF THEOLOGY. I05 
 
 tion, as supposed to subsist between two things, either 
 of which is as much as the other, which Jacobi mainly 
 has in his eye when he attacks the demonstrations of the 
 understanding. Justly censuring them for seeking con- 
 ditions [i.e. the world) for the unconditioned, he remarks 
 that the Infinite or God must on such a method be pre- 
 sented as dependent and derivative. But that elevation, 
 as it takes place in the mind, serves to correct this 
 semblance : in fact, it has no other meaning than to 
 correct that semblance. Jacobi, however, failed to re- 
 cognise the genuine nature of essential thought— by 
 which it cancels the mediation in the very act of 
 mediating; and consequently, his objection, though it 
 tells against the merely ' reflective ' understanding, is 
 false when applied to thought as a whole, and in par- 
 ticular to reasonable thought. 
 
 To explain what we mean by the neglect of the nega- 
 tive factor in thought, we may refer by way of illustration 
 to the charges of Pantheism and Atheism brought 
 against the doctrines of Spinoza. The absolute Sub- 
 stance of Spinoza certainly falls short of absolute spirit, 
 and it is a right and' proper requirement that God 
 should be defined as absolute spirit. But when the 
 definition in Spinoza is said to identify the world with 
 God, and to confound God with nature and the finite 
 world, it is implied that the finite world possesses a 
 genuine actuality and affirmative reality. If this as- 
 sumption be admitted, of course a union of God with 
 the world renders God completely finite, an J degrades 
 Him to the bare finite and adventitious congeries of 
 existence. But there are two objections to be noted. 
 In the first place Spinoza does not define God as the 
 unity of God with the world, but as the union of thought 
 with extension, that is, with the material world. And 
 secondly, even if we accept this awkward popular state- 
 
Io6 SECOND ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [50, 
 
 ment as to this unity, it would still be true that the 
 system of Spinoza was not Atheism but Acosmism, de- 
 fining the world to be an appearance lacking in true 
 reality. A philosophy, which affirms that God and God 
 alone is, should not be stigmatised as atheistic, when even 
 those nations which worship the ape, the cow, or images 
 of stone and brass, are credited with some religion. 
 But as things stand the imagination of ordinary men 
 feels a vehement reluctance to surrender its dearest 
 conviction, that this aggregate of finitude, which it calls 
 a world, has actual reality ; and to hold that there is no 
 world is a way of thinking they are fain to believe im- 
 possible, or at least much less possible than to entertain 
 the idea that there is no God. Human nature, not 
 much to its credit, is more ready to believe that a system 
 denies God, than that it denies the world. A denial of 
 God seems so much more intelligible than a denial of 
 the world. 
 
 The second remark bears on the criticism of the 
 material propositions to which that elevation in thought 
 in the first instance leads. If these propositions have 
 for their predicate such terms as substance of the world, 
 its necessary essence, cause which regulates and directs 
 it according to design, they are certainly inadequate to 
 express what is or ought to be understood by God. Yet 
 apart from the trick of adopting a preliminary popular 
 conception of God, and criticising a result by this as- 
 sumed standard, it is certain that these characteristics 
 have great value, and are necessary factors in the idea 
 of God. But if we wish in this way to bring before 
 thought the genuine idea of God, and give its true value 
 and expression to the central truth, we must be careful 
 not to start from a subordinate level of facts. To 
 speak of the ' merely contingent * things of the world 
 is a very inadequate description of the premisses. The 
 
5o-5r.] PRINCIPLES OF THEOLOGY. 107 
 
 organic structures, and the evidence they afford of mutual 
 adaptation, belong to a higher province, the province of 
 animated nature. But even without taking into con- 
 sideration the possible blemish which the study of 
 animated nature and of the other teleological aspects of 
 existing things may contract from the pettiness of the 
 final causes, and from puerile instances of them and 
 their bearings, merely animated nature is, at the best, 
 incapabl'^ of supplying the material for a truthful ex- 
 pression to the idf . of God. God is more than life : 
 He is Spirit. And therefore if the thought of the Abso- 
 lute takes a startinp--point for its rise, and desires to 
 take the nearest, the most true and adequate starting- 
 point will be found in the nature of spirit alone. 
 
 51.] The other way of unification by which to realise 
 the Ideal of Reason is to set out from the ahstractum of 
 Thought and seek to characterise it : for which purpose 
 Being is the only available term. This is the method of 
 the Ontological proof The opposition, here presented 
 from a merely subjective point of view, lies between 
 Thought and Being; whereas in the first way of junc- 
 tion, being is common to the two sides of the antithesis, 
 and the contrast lies only between its individualisation 
 and universalit}'. Understanding meets this second 
 way with what is implicitly the same objection, as it made 
 to the first. It denied that the empirical involves the 
 universal : so it denies that the universal involves the 
 specialisation, which specialisation in this instance is 
 being. In other words it says : Being cannot be de- 
 duced from the notion by any analysis. 
 
 The uniformly favourable reception and acceptance 
 which attended Kant's criticism of the Ontological 
 proof was undoubtedly due to the illustration which 
 he made use of. To explain the difference between 
 thought and being, he took the instance of a hundred 
 
Io8 SECOND ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [51. 
 
 sovereigns, which, for anything it matters to the notion, 
 are the same hundred whether they are real or only 
 possible, though the difference of the two cases is very 
 perceptible in their effect on a man's purse. Nothing 
 can be more obvious than that anything we only think 
 or conceive is not on that account actual : that mental 
 representation, and even notional comprehension, always 
 falls short of being. Still it may not unfairly be styled 
 a barbarism in language, when the name of notion is 
 given to things like a hundred sovereigns. And, putting 
 that mistake aside, those who perpetually urge against 
 the philosophic Idea the difference between Being and 
 Thought, might have admitted that philosophers were 
 not wholly ignorant of the fact. Can there be any pro- 
 position more trite than this ? But after all, it is well 
 to remember, when we speak of God, that we have an 
 object of another kind than any hundred sovereigns, 
 and unlike any one particular notion, representation, 
 or however else it may be styled. It is in fact this and 
 this alone which marks everything finite : — its being in 
 time and space is discrepant from its notion. God, on 
 the contrary, expressly has to be what can only be 
 'thought as existing'; His notion involves being. It 
 is this unity of the notion and being that constitutes 
 the notion of God. 
 
 If this were all, we should have only a formal expres- 
 sion of the divine nature which would not really go 
 beyond a statement of the nature of the notion itself. 
 And that the notion, in its most abstract terms, involves 
 being is plain. For the notion, whatever other deter- 
 mination it may receive, is at least reference back on 
 itself, which results by abolishing the intermediation, 
 and thus is immediate. And what is that reference to 
 self, but being ? Certainly it would be strange if the 
 notion, the very inmost of mind, if even the 'Ego,' or 
 
51-52.] PRINCIPLES OF THEOLOGY. 109 
 
 above all, the concrete totality we call God, were not 
 rich enough to include so poor a category as being, the 
 very poorest and most abstract of all. For, if we look 
 at the thought it holds, nothing can be more insignificant 
 than being. And yet there may be something still more 
 insignificant than being,— that which at first sight is 
 perhaps supposed to be, an external and sensible exist- 
 ence, like that of the paper lying before me. However, 
 in this matter, nobody proposes to speak of the sensible 
 existence of a limited and perishable thing. Besides, 
 the petty stricture of the Kritik that ' thought and being 
 are different ' can at most molest the path of the human 
 mind from the thought of God to the certainty that He 
 is : it cannot take it away. It is this process of transi- 
 tion, depending on the absolute inseparability of the 
 thought of God from His being, for which its proper 
 authority has been re-vindicated in the theory of faith or 
 immediate knowledge,— whereof hereafter. 
 
 52.] In this way thought, at its highest pitch, has to 
 go outside for any determinateness : and although it is 
 continually termed Reason, is out-and-out abstract think- 
 ing. And the result of all is that Reason supplies 
 nothing beyond the formal unity required to simplify 
 and systematise experiences ; it is a canon, not an 
 organon of truth, and can furnish only a criticism of 
 knowledge, not a doctrine of the infinite. In its final 
 analysis this criticism is summed up in the assertion 
 that in strictness thought is only the indeterminate unity 
 and the action of this indeterminate unity. 
 
 Kant undoubtedly held reason to be the faculty of the 
 unconditioned ; but if reason be reduced to abstract identity 
 only, it by implication renounces its unconditionality and is 
 in reality no better than empty understanding. For reason 
 is unconditioned, only in so far as its character and quality 
 are not due to an extraneous and foreign content, only in so 
 
no SECOND ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [52-54- 
 
 far as it is self-characterising, and thus, in point of content, 
 is its own master. Kant, however, expressly explains that 
 the action of reason consists solely in applying the categories 
 to systematise the matter given by perception, ;. e. to place 
 it in an outside order, under the guidance of the principle ot 
 non- contradiction. 
 
 53.] {b) The Practical Keason is understood by Kant 
 to mean a thinking Will, i.e. a Will that determines 
 itself on universal principles. Its office is to give objec- 
 tive, imperative laws of freedom, — laws, that is, which 
 state what ought to happen. The warrant for thus 
 assuming thought to be an activity which makes itself 
 felt objectively, that is, to be really a Reason, is the 
 alleged possibility of proving practical freedom by ex- 
 perience, that is, of showing it in the phenomenon of 
 self-consciousness. This experience in consciousness 
 is at Once met by all that the Necessitarian produces 
 from contrary experience, particularly by the sceptical 
 induction (employed amongst others by Hume) from the 
 endless diversity of what men regard as right and 
 duty, — i.e. from the diversity apparent in those pro- 
 fessedly objective laws of freedom. 
 
 54.] What, then, is to serve as the law which the 
 Practical Reason embraces and obeys, and as the 
 criterion in its act of self-determination ? There is no 
 rule at hand but the same abstract identity of under- 
 standing as before : There must be no contradiction in 
 the act of selfdetermination. Hence the Practical 
 Reason never shakes off the formalism which is repre- 
 sented as the climax of the Theoretical Reason. 
 
 But this Practical Reason does not confine the uni- 
 versal principle of the Good to its own inward regula- 
 tion : it first becomes practical, in the true sense of the 
 word, when it insists on the Good being manifested in 
 the world with an outward objectivity, and requires that 
 
54.] PRACTICAL REASON. Ill 
 
 the thought shall be objective throughout, and not 
 merely subjective. We shall speak of this postulate 
 of the Practical Reason afterwards. 
 
 The free self-determination which Kant denied to the 
 speculative, he has expressly vindicated for the practical 
 reason. To many minds this particular aspect of the 
 Kantian philosophy made it welcome ; and that for good 
 reasons. To estimate rightly what we owe to Kant in the 
 matter, we ought to set before our minds the form of practical 
 philosophy and in particular of 'moral philosophy,' which 
 prevailed in his time. It may be generally described as a 
 system of Eudaemonism, which, when asked what man's 
 chief end ought to be, replied Happiness. And by happiness 
 Eudaemonism understood the satisfaction of the private 
 appetites, wishes and wants of the man : thus raising the 
 contingent and particular into a principle for the will and 
 its actualisation. To this Eudaemonism, which was desti- 
 tute of stability and consistency, and which left the 'door 
 and gate ' wide open for every whim and caprice, Kant 
 opposed the practical reason, and thus emphasised the need 
 for a principle of will which should be universal and lay 
 the same obligation on all. The theoretical reason, as has 
 been made evident in the preceding paragraphs, is identified 
 by Kant with the negative faculty of the infinite ; and as it 
 has no positive content of its own, it is restricted to the 
 function of detecting the finitude of experiential knowledge. 
 To the practical reason, on the contrary, he has expressly 
 allowed a positive infinity, by ascribing to the will the power 
 of modifying itself in universal modes, i.e. by thought. 
 Such a power the will undoubtedly has : and it is well to 
 remember that man is free only in so far as he possesses it 
 and avails himself of it in his conduct. But a recognition of 
 the existence of this power is not enough and does not avail 
 to tell us what are the contents of the will or practical 
 reason. Hence to saj'^, that a man must make the Good the 
 content of his will, raises the question, what that content is, 
 and what are the means of ascertaining what good is. Nor 
 does one get over the difficulty by the principle that the 
 
112 SECOND ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [54-55. 
 
 will must be consistent with itself, or by the precept to do 
 duty for the sake of duty. 
 
 55.] {c) The Reflective Power of Judgment is in- 
 vested by Kant with the function of an Intuitive Under- 
 standing. That is to say, whereas the particulars had 
 hitherto appeared, so far as the universal or abstract 
 identity was concerned, adventitious and incapable of 
 being deduced from it, the Intuitive Understanding 
 apprehends the particulars as moulded and formed by 
 the universal itself. Experience presents such univer- 
 salised particulars in the products of Art and of organic 
 nature. 
 
 The capital feature in Kant's Criticism of the Judg- 
 ment is, that in it he gave a representation and a name, 
 if not even an intellectual expression, to the Idea. Such 
 a representation, as an Intuitive Understanding, or an 
 inner adaptation, suggests a universal which is at the 
 same time apprehended as essentially a concrete unity. 
 It is in these aper^us alone that the Kantian philosophy 
 rises to the speculative height. Schiller, and others, have 
 found in the idea of artistic beauty, where thought and 
 sensuous conception have grown together into one, a 
 way of escape from the abstract and separatist under- 
 standing. Others have found the same relief in the 
 perception and consciousness of life and of living things, 
 whether that life be natural or intellectual, — The work 
 of Art, as well as the living individual, is, it must be 
 owned, of limited content. But in the postulated har- 
 mony of nature (or necessity) and free purpose, — in the 
 final purpose of the world conceived as realised, KantJ 
 has put before us the Idea, comprehensive even in itg 
 content. Yet what may be called the laziness of 
 thought, when dealing with this supreme Idea, finds 
 a too easy mode of evasion in the ' ought to be ' : instead 
 of the actual realisation of the ultimate end, it clings 
 
55-57-] AESTHETIC AND ORGANIC IDEAS. II3 
 
 hard to the disjunction of the notion from reality. Yet 
 if thought will not think the ideal realised, the senses 
 and the intuition can at any rate see it in the present 
 reality of living organisms and of the beautiful in Art. 
 And consequently Kant's remarks on these objects were 
 well adapted to lead the mind on to grasp and think the 
 concrete Idea. 
 
 56.] We are thus led to conceive a different relation 
 between the universal of understanding and the par- 
 ticular of perception, than that on which the theory of 
 the Theoretical and Practical Reason is founded. But 
 while this is so, it is not supplemented by a recognition 
 that the former is the genuine relation and the ver}' 
 truth. Instead of that, the unity (of universal with par- 
 ticular) is accepted only as it exists in finite phenomena, 
 and is adduced only as a fact of experience. Such ex- 
 perience, at first only personal, may come from two 
 sources. It may spring from Genius, the faculty which 
 produces 'aesthetic ideas'; meaning by aesthetic ideas, 
 the picture-thoughts of the free imagination which sub- 
 serve an idea and suggest thoughts, although their con- 
 tent is not expressed in a notional form, and even admits 
 of no such expression. It may also be due to Taste, the 
 feeling of congruity between the free play of intuition or 
 imagination and the uniformity of understanding. 
 
 57.] The principle by which the Reflective faculty of 
 Judgment regulates and arranges the products of ani- 
 mated nature is described as the End or final cause, — the 
 notion in action, the universal at once determining and 
 determinate in itself. At the same time Kant is careful 
 to discard the conception of external or finite adaptation, 
 in which the End is only an adventitious form for the 
 means and material in which it is realised. In the living 
 organism, on the contrary, the final cause is a mould- 
 ing principle and an energy immanent in the matter, 
 
 VOL. II. 1 
 
114 SECOND ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [57-60. 
 
 and every member is in its turn a means as well as an 
 end. 
 
 58.] Such an Idea evidently radically transforms the 
 relation which the understanding institutes between 
 means and ends, between subjectivity and objectivity. 
 And yet in the face of this unification, the End or 
 design is subsequently explained to be a cause which 
 exists and acts subjectively, i. e. as our idea only : and 
 teleology is accordingly explained to be only a principle 
 of criticism, purely personal to our understanding. 
 
 After the Critical philosophy had settled that Reason 
 can know phenomena only, there would still have been 
 an option for animated nature between two equally sub- 
 jective modes of thought. Even according to Kant's 
 own exposition, there would have been an obligation to 
 admit, in the case of natural productions, a knowledge 
 not confined to the categories of quality, cause and 
 effect, composition, constituents, and so on. The prin- 
 ciple of inward adaptation or design, had it been kept to 
 and carried out in scientific application, would have led 
 to a different and a higher method of observing nature. 
 59.] If we adopt this principle, the Idea, when all 
 limitations were removed from it, would appear as 
 follows. The universality moulded by Reason, and 
 described as the absolute and final end or the Good, 
 would be realised in the world, and realised moreover 
 by means of a third thing, the power which proposes 
 this End as well as realises it, — that is, God. Thus in 
 Him, who is the absolute truth, those oppositions of 
 universal and individual, subjective and objective, are 
 solved and explained to be neither self-subsistent nor 
 true, 
 
 60.] But Good, — which is thus put forward as the final 
 cause of the world,— has been already described as only 
 our good, the moral law of our Practical Reason. This 
 
6o.] KANT'S ULTIMATE POSITION. 115 
 
 being so, the unity in question goes no further than 
 make the state of the world and the course of its events 
 harmonise with our moral standards '. Besides, even 
 with this limitation, the final cause, or Good, is a vague 
 abstraction, and the same vagueness attaches to what is 
 to be Duty. But, further, this harmony is met by the 
 revival and re-assertion of the antithesis, which it by its 
 own principle had nullified. The harmony is then de- 
 scribed as merely subjective, something which merely 
 ought to be, and which at the same time is not real, — a. 
 mere article of faith, possessing a subjective certainty, 
 but without truth, or that objectivity which is proper to 
 the Idea. This contradiction may seem to be disguised 
 by adjourning the realisation of the Idea to a future, to 
 a time when the Idea will also be. But a sensuous con- 
 dition like time is the reverse of a reconciliation of the 
 discrepancy ; and an infinite progression — which is the 
 corresponding image adopted by the understanding — 
 on the very face of it only repeats and re-enacts the 
 contradiction. 
 
 A general remark may still be offered on the result to 
 which the Critical philosophy led as to the nature of 
 knowledge ; a result which has grown one of the current 
 'idols' or axiomatic beliefs of the day. In every 
 dualistic system, and especially in that of Kant, the 
 fundamental defect makes itself visible in the incon- 
 
 ' In Kant's own words (Criticism of the Power of Judgment, 
 p. 427) : ' Final Cause is merely a notion of our practical reason. It 
 cannot be deduced from any data of experience as a theoretical 
 criterion of nature, nor can it be applied to know nature. No 
 employment of this notion is possible except solely for the practical 
 reason, by moral laws. The final purpose of the Creation is that 
 constitution of the world which harmonises with that to which alone 
 we can give definite expression on universal principles, viz. the final 
 purpose of our pure practical reason, and with that in so far as it 
 means to be practical.' 
 
 I 2 
 
Il6 SECOND ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [60. 
 
 sistency of unifying at one moment, what a moment 
 before had been explained to be independent and there- 
 fore incapable of unification. And then, at the very 
 moment after unification has been alleged to be the 
 truth, we suddenly come upon the doctrine that the two 
 elements, which, in their true status of unification, had 
 been refused all independent subsistence, are only true 
 and actual in their state of separation. Philosophising 
 of this kind wants the little penetration needed to dis- 
 cover, that this shuffling only evidences how unsatisfac- 
 tory each one of the two terms is. And it fails simply 
 because it is incapable of bringing two thoughts together. 
 (And in point of form there are never more than two.) 
 It argues an utter want of consistency to say, on the one 
 hand, that th« understanding only knows phenomena, 
 and, on the other, assert the absolute character of this 
 knowledge, by such statements as ' Cognition can go no 
 further ' ; ' Here is u\e natural and absolute limit of 
 human knowledge.' But 'natural' is the wrong word 
 here. The things of nature are limited and are natural 
 things only to such extent as they are not aware of their 
 universal limit, or to such extent as their mode or quality 
 is a limit from our point of view, and not from their own. 
 No one knows, or even feels, that anything is a limit 
 or defect, until he is at the same time above and beyond 
 it. Living beings, for example, possess the privilege of 
 pain which is denied to the inanimate : even with living 
 beings, a single mode or quality passes into the feeling 
 of a negative. For living beings as such possess 
 within them a universal vitality, which overpasses and 
 includes the single mode; and thus, as they maintain 
 themselves in the negative of themselves, they feel the 
 contradiction to exist within them. But the contradic- 
 tion is within them, only in so far as one and the same 
 subject includes both the universality of their sense of 
 
6o.] CRITICISM OF KANT'S POSITION. I17 
 
 life, and the individual mode which is in negation with 
 it. This illustration will show how a limit or imperfec- 
 tion in knowledge comes to be termed a limit or imper- 
 fection, only when it is compared with the actually- 
 present Idea of the universal, of a total and perfect. 
 A very little consideration might show, that to call 
 a thing finite or limited proves by implication the very 
 presence of the infinite and unlimited, and that our 
 knowledge of a limit can only be when the unlimited is 
 on this side in consciousness. 
 
 The result however of Kant's view of cognition sug- 
 gests a second remark. The philosophy of Kant could 
 have no influence on the method of the sciences. It 
 leaves the categories and method of ordinary knowledge 
 quite unmolested. Occasionally, it may be, in the first 
 sections of a scientific work of that period, we find pro- 
 positi ns borrowed from the Kantian philosophy : but 
 the course of the treatise renders it apparent that these 
 propositions were superfluous decoration, and that the 
 few first pages might have been omitted without produc- 
 ing the least change in the empirical contents \ 
 
 We may next institute a comparison of Kant with the 
 metaphysics of the empirical school. Natural plain 
 Empiricism, though it unquestionably insists most upon 
 sensuous perception, still allows a super-sensible world 
 or spiritual reality, whatever may be its structure and 
 constitution, and whether derived from intellect, or from 
 imagination, Si.c. So far as form goes, the facts of this 
 super-sensible world rest on the authority of mind, in 
 
 ^ Even Hermann's ' Handbook of Prosody' begins with paragraphs 
 of Kantian philosophy. In § 8 it is argued that a law of rhythm must 
 be (i) objective, (2) formal, and (3) determined a priori. With these 
 requirements and with the principles of Causality and Reciprocity 
 which follow later, it were well to compare the treatment of. the 
 various measures, upon which those formal principles do not exercise 
 the slightest influence. 
 
Il8 SECOND ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [60. 
 
 the same way as the other facts, embraced in empirical 
 knowledge, rest on the authority of external perception. 
 But when Empiricism becomes reflective and logically 
 consistent, it turns its arms against this dualism in the 
 ultimate and highest species of fact ; it denies the inde- 
 pendence of the thinking principle and of a spiritual 
 world which developes itself in thought. Materialism 
 or Naturalism, therefore, is the consistent and thorough- 
 going system of Empiricism. In direct opposition to 
 such an Empiricism, Kant asserts the principle of 
 thought and freedom, and attaches himself to the first- 
 mentioned form of empirical doctrine, the general prin- 
 ciples of which he never departed from. There is a 
 dualism in his philosophy also. On one side stands the 
 world of sensation, and of the understanding which 
 reflects upon it. This world, it is true, he alleges to be 
 a world of appearances. But that is only a title or 
 formal description ; for the source, the facts, and the 
 modes of observation continue quite the same as in 
 Empiricism. On the other side and independent stands 
 a self-apprehending thought, the principle of freedom, 
 which Kant has in common with ordinary and bygone 
 metaphysic, but emptied of all that it held, and without 
 his being able to infuse into it anything new. For, in 
 the Critical doctrine, thought, or, as it is there called, 
 Reason, is divested of every specific form, and thus 
 bereft of all authority. The main effect of the Kantian 
 philosophy has been to revive the consciousness of 
 Reason, or the absolute inwardness of thought. Its 
 abstractness indeed prevented that inwardness from de- 
 veloping into anything, or from originating any special 
 forms, whether cognitive principles or moral laws ; but 
 nevertheless it absolutely refused to accept or indulge 
 anything possessing the character of an externality. 
 Henceforth the principle of the independence of Reason, 
 
6o.] KANT AND FICHTE. II9 
 
 or of its absolute self-subsistence, is made a general 
 principle of philosophy, as well as a foregone conclusion 
 of the time. 
 
 (i) The Critical philosophy has one great negative merit. 
 It has brought home the conviction that the categories of 
 understanding are finite in their range, and that any cogni- 
 tive process confined within their pale falls short of the 
 truth. But Kant had only a sight of half the truth. He 
 explained the finite nature of the categories to mean that 
 they were subjective only, valid only for our thought, from 
 which the thing-in-itself was divided by an impassable gulf 
 In fact, however, it is not because they are subjective, that 
 the categories are finite : they are finite by their very nature, 
 and it is on their own selves that it is requisite to exhibit 
 their finitude. Kant however holds that what we think is 
 false, because it is we who think it. A further deficiency in 
 the system is that it gives only an historical description of 
 thought, and a mere enumeration of the factors of conscious- 
 ness. The enumeration is in the main correct: but not a 
 word touches upon the necessity of what is thus empirically 
 colligated. The observations, made on the various stages 
 of consciousness, culminate in the summary statement, that 
 the content of all we are acquainted with is only an ap- 
 pearance. And as it is true at least that all finite thinking 
 is concerned with appearances, so far the conclusion is 
 justified. This stage of 'appearance' however — the pheno- 
 menal world— is not the terminus of thought: there is 
 another and a higher region. But that region was to the 
 Kantian philosophy an inaccessible ' other world.' 
 
 (2) After all it was only formally, that the Kantian system 
 established the principle that thought is spontaneous and 
 self-determining. Into details of the manner and the extent 
 of this self-determination of thought, Kant never went. 
 It was Fichte who first noticed the omission ; and who, 
 after he had called attention to the want of a deduction for 
 the categories, endeavoured really to supply something of 
 the kind. With Fichte, the 'Ego' is the starting-point in 
 the philosophical development : and the outcome of its 
 action is supposed to be visible in the categories. But in 
 
I20 SECOND ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [60. 
 
 Fichte the 'Ego' is not really presented as a free, sponta- 
 neous energy ; it is supposed to receive its first excitation by 
 a shock or impulse from without. Against this shock the 
 ' Ego ' will, it is assumed, react, and only through this re- 
 action does it first become conscious o'f itself. Meanwhile, 
 the nature of the impulse remains a stranger beyond our 
 pale : and the ' Ego,' with something else always confronting 
 it, is weighted with a condition. Fichte, in consequence, 
 never advanced beyond Kant's conclusion, that the finite 
 only is knowable, while the infinite transcends the range of 
 thought. What Kant calls the thing-by-itself, Fichte calls 
 the impulse from without— that abstraction of something 
 else than ' I,' not otherwise describable or definable than as 
 the negative or non-Ego in general. The ' I ' is thus looked 
 at as standing in essential relation with the not-I, through 
 which its act of self-determination is first awakened. And 
 in this manner the * I ' is but the continuous act of self- 
 liberation from this impulse, never gaining a real freedom, 
 because with the surcease of the impulse the ' I,' whose 
 being is its action, would also cease to be. Nor is the con- 
 tent produced by the action of the * I ' at all different from 
 the ordinary content of experience, except by the supple- 
 mentary remark, that this content is mere appearance. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 THIRD ATTITUDE OF THOUGHT TO OBJECTIVITY. 
 
 Immediate or Intuitive Knowledge. 
 
 61.] If we are to believe the Critical philosophy, 
 thought is subjective, and its ultimate and invincible 
 mode is abstract universality or formal identity. Thought 
 is thus set in opposition to Truth, which is no abstrac- 
 tion, but concrete universality. In this highest mode of 
 thought, which is entitled Reason, the Categories are 
 left out of account. — The extreme theory on the oppo- 
 site side holds thought to be an act of the particular 
 only, and on that ground declares it incapable of appre- 
 hending the Truth. This is the Intuitional theory. 
 
 62.] According to this theory, thinking, a private and 
 particular operation, has its whole scope and product in 
 the Categories. But, these Categories, as arrested by 
 the understanding, are limited- vehicles of thought, forms 
 of the conditioned, of the dependent and derivative. 
 A thought limited to these modes has no sense of the 
 Infinite and the True, and cannot bridge over the gulf 
 that separates it from them. (This stricture refers to 
 the proofs of God's existence.) These inadequate modes 
 or categories are also spoken of as notions : and to get 
 a notion of an object therefore can only mean, in this 
 language, to grasp it under the form of being conditioned 
 and derivative. Consequently, if the object in question 
 be the True, the Infinite, the Unconditioned, we change 
 
122 THIRD ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [62. 
 
 it by our notions into a finite and conditioned; whereby, 
 instead of apprehending the truth by thought, we have 
 perverted it into untruth. 
 
 Such is the one simple line of argument advanced for 
 the thesis that the knowledge of God and of truth must 
 be immediate, or intuitive. At an earlier period all sort 
 of anthropomorphic conceptions, as they are termed, 
 were banished from God, as being finite and therefore 
 unworthy of the infinite ; and in this way God had been 
 reduced to a tolerably blank being. But in those days 
 the thought-forms were in general not supposed to come 
 under the head of anthropomorphism. Thought was 
 believed rather to strip finitude from the conceptions of 
 the Absolute, — in agreement with the above-mentioned 
 conviction of all ages, that reflection is the only road to 
 truth. But now, at length, even the thought-forms are 
 pronounced anthropomorphic, and thought itself is de- 
 scribed as a mere faculty of finitisation. 
 
 Jacobi has stated this charge most distinctly in the 
 seventh supplement to his Letters on Spinoza, — borrow- 
 ing his line of argument from the works of Spinoza 
 himself, and applying it as a weapon against knowledge 
 in general. In his attack knowledge is taken to mean 
 knowledge of the finite only, a process of thought from 
 one condition in a series to another, each of which is at 
 once conditioning and conditioned. According to such 
 a view, to explain and to get the notion of anything, is 
 the same as to show it to be derived from something 
 else. Whatever such knowledge embraces, conse- 
 quently, is partial, dependent and finite, while the 
 infinite or true, i. e. God, lies outside of the mechanical 
 inter-connexion to which knowledge is said to be con- 
 fined. — It is important to observe that, while Kant 
 makes the finite nature of the Categories consist mainly 
 in the formal circumstance that they are subjective, 
 
6a-63.] PHILOSOPHY OF JACOBI. I23 
 
 Jacobi discusses the Categories in their own proper 
 character, and pronounces them to be in their very 
 import finite. What Jacobi chiefly had before his eyes, 
 when he thus described science, was the brilHant suc- 
 cesses of the physical or ' exact ' sciences in ascertaining 
 natural forces and laws. It is certainly not on the finite 
 ground occupied by these sciences that we can expect 
 to meet the in-dwelling presence of the infinite. Lalande 
 was right when he said he had swept the whole heaven 
 with his glass, and seen no God. (See note to § 60.) 
 In the field of physical science, the universal, which is 
 the final result of analysis, is only the indeterminate 
 aggregate, — of the external finite, — in one word, Matter: 
 and Jacobi well perceived that there was no other issue 
 obtainable in the way of a mere advance from one 
 explanatory clause or law to another. 
 
 63.] All the while the doctrine that truth exists for 
 the mind was so strongly maintained by Jacobi, that 
 Reason alone is declared to be that by which man lives. 
 This Reason is the knowledge of God. But, seeing 
 that derivative knowledge is restricted to the compass 
 of finite facts. Reason is knowledge underivative, or 
 Faith. 
 
 Knowledge, Faith, Thought, Intuition are the cate- 
 gories that we meet with on this line of reflection. 
 These terms, as presumably familiar to every one, are 
 only too frequently subjected to an arbitrary use, under 
 no better guidance than the conceptions and distinctions 
 of psychology, without any investigation into their 
 nature and notion, which is the main question after all. 
 Thus, we often find knowledge contrasted with faith, 
 and faith at the same time explained to be an underiva- 
 tive or intuitive knowledge : — so that it must be, at least 
 some s6rt of knowledge. And, besides, it is unquestion- 
 ably a fact of experience, firstly, that what we believe is 
 
124 THIRD ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [63. 
 
 in our consciousness, — which implies that we know about 
 it) and secondly, that this belief is a certainty in our 
 consciousness, — which implies that we know it. Again, 
 and especially, we find thought opposed to immediate 
 knowledge and faith, and, in particular, to intuition. 
 But if this intuition be qualified as intellectual, we must 
 really mean intuition which thinks, unless, in a question 
 about the nature of God, we are willing to interpret intel- 
 lect to mean images and representations of imagination. 
 The word faith or belief, in the dialect of this system, 
 comes to be employed even with reference to common 
 objects that are present to the senses. We believe, says 
 Jacobi, that we have a body, — we believe in the existence 
 of the things of sense. But if we are speaking of faith 
 in the True and Eternal, and saying that God is given 
 and revealed to us in immediate knowledge or intuition, 
 we are concerned not with the things of sense, but with 
 objects special to our thinking mind, with truths of 
 inherently universal significance. And when the indi- 
 vidual * I,' or in other words personality, is under 
 discussion — not the ' I ' of experience, or a single private 
 person — above all, when the personality of God is 
 before us, we are speaking of personality unalloyed, — 
 of a personality in its own nature universal. Such per- 
 sonality is a thought, and falls within the province of 
 thought only. More than this. Pure and simple intui- 
 tion is completely the same as pure and simple thought. 
 Intuition and belief, in the first instance, denote the 
 definite conceptions we attach to these words in our 
 ordinary employment of them : and to this extent they 
 differ from thought in certain points which nearly every 
 one can understand. But here they are taken in a 
 higher sense, and must be interpreted to mean a belief 
 in God, or an intellectual intuition of God ; in short, we 
 must put aside all that especially distinguishes thought 
 
63.] BELIEF, FAITH, INTUITION. 125 
 
 on the one side from belief and intuition on the other. 
 How belief and intuition, when transferred to these 
 higher regions, differ from thought, it is impossible for 
 any one to say. And yet, such are the barren distinc- 
 tions of words, with which men fancy that they assert 
 an important truth : even while the formulae they main- 
 tain are identical with those which they impugn. 
 
 The term Faith brings with it the special advantage of 
 suggesting the faith of the Christian religion ; it seems 
 to include Christian faith, or perhaps even to coincide 
 with it ; and tiius the Philosophy of Faith has a 
 thoroughly orthodox and Christian look, on the strength 
 of which it takes the liberty of uttering its arbitrary 
 dicta with greater pretension and authority. But we 
 must not let ourselves be deceived by the semblance 
 surreptitiously secured by a merely verbal similarity. 
 The two things are radically distinct. Firstly, the 
 Christian faith comprises in it an authority of the 
 Church : but the faith of Jacobi's philosophy has no 
 other authority thaii that of a personal revelation. And, 
 secondl}^, the Christian faith ib a copious body of objec- 
 tive truth, a system of knowledge and doctrine : while 
 the scope of the philosophic faith is so utterly indefinite, 
 that, while it has room for the faith of the Christian, it 
 equally admits a belief in the divinity of the Dalai-lama, 
 the ox, or the monkey, — thus, so far as it goes, narrowing 
 Deity down to its simplest terms, a 'Supreme Being.* 
 Faith itself, taken in this professedly philosophical sense, 
 is nothing but the sapless abstract of immediate know- 
 ledge, — a purely formal category applicable to very 
 different facts ; and it ought never to be confused or 
 identified with the spiritual fulness of Christian faith, 
 whether we look at that faith in the heart of the believer 
 and the in-dwelling of the Holy Spirit, or in the system 
 of theological doctrine. 
 
126 THIRD ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [63-64. 
 
 With what is here called faith or immediate know- 
 ledge must also be identified inspiration, the heart's 
 revelations, the truths implanted in man by nature, and 
 also in particular, healthy reason or Common Sense, 
 as it is called. All these forms agree in adopting as 
 their leading principle the immediacy, or self-evident 
 way, in which a fact or body of truths is presented in 
 consciousness. 
 
 64.] This immediate knowledge consists in knowing 
 that the Infinite, the Eternal, the God which is in 
 our idea, really is : or, it asserts that in our conscious- 
 ness there is immediately and inseparably bound up 
 with this idea the certainty of its actual being. 
 
 To seek to controvert these maxims of immediate 
 knowledge is the last thing philosophers would think of. 
 They may rather find occasion for self-gratulation when 
 these ancient doctrines, expressing as they do the 
 general tenor of philosophic teaching, have, even in this 
 unphilosophical fashion, become to some extent uni- 
 versal convictions of the age. The true marvel rather 
 is that any one could suppose that these principles were 
 opposed to philosophy, — the maxims, viz., that whatever 
 is held to be true is immanent in the mind, and that 
 there is truth for the mind (§ 63). From a formal point 
 of view, there is a peculiar interest in the maxim that 
 the being of God is immediately and inseparably bound 
 up with the thought of God, that objectivity is bound up 
 with the subjectivity which the thought originally pre- 
 sents. Not content with that, the philosophy of imme 
 diate knowledge goes so far in its one-sided view, as to 
 affirm that the attribute of existence, even in perception, 
 is quite as inseparably connected with the conception we 
 have of our own bodies and of external things, as it is 
 with the thought of God. Now it is the endeavour of 
 philosophy to prove such a unity, to show that it lies in 
 
64.] JACOBI AND DESCARTES. 127 
 
 the very nature of thought and subjectivity, to be in- 
 separable from being and objectivity. In these circum- 
 stances therefore, philosophy, whatever estimate may be 
 formed of the character of these proofs, must in any case 
 be glad to see it shown and maintained that its maxims 
 are facts of consciousness, and thus in harmony with 
 experience. The difference between philosophy and 
 the asseverations of immediate knowledge rather centres 
 in the exclusive attitude which immediate knowledge 
 adopts, when it sets itself up against philosophy. 
 
 And yet it was as a self-evident or immediate truth 
 that the ' Cogito, ergo sum,' of Descartes, the maxim on 
 which may be said to hinge the whole interest of 
 Modern Philosophy, was first stated by its author. 
 The man who calls this a syllogism, must know little 
 more about a syllogism than that the word ' Ergo ' 
 occurs in it. Where shall we look for the middle term ? 
 And a middle term is a much more essential point of a 
 syllogism than the word ' Ergo,' If we try to justify the 
 name, by calling the combination of ideas in Descartes 
 an 'immediate' syllogism, this superfluous variety of 
 syllogism is a mere name for an utterly unmediated 
 synthesis of distinct terms of thought. That being so, 
 the synthesis of being with our ideas, as stated in the 
 maxim of immediate knowledge, has no more and no 
 less claim to the title of syllogism than the axiom of 
 Descartes has. From Hotho's ' Dissertation on the 
 Cartesian Philosophy' (published 1826), I borrow the 
 quotation in which Descartes himself distinctly declares 
 that the maxim 'Cogito, ergo sum,' is no syllogism. 
 The passages are Respons. ad II Object. : De Methodo 
 IV: Ep. I. 118. From the first passage I quote the 
 words more immediately to the point. Descartes says : 
 ' That we are thinking beings is "prima quaedam notio 
 quae ex nullo syllogismo concluditur" ' (a certain primary 
 
128 THIRD ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [64-65. 
 
 notion, which is deduced from no syllogism) ; and goes 
 on: ' neque cum quis dicit ; Ego cogito, ergo sum sive 
 existo, existentiam ex cogitatione per syllogismum deductt.' 
 (Nor, when one says, I think, therefore I am or exist, 
 does he deduce existence from thought by means of a 
 syllogism.) Descartes knew what it implied in a syllo- 
 gism, and so he adds that, in order to make the maxim 
 admit of a deduction by syllogism, we should have to 
 add the major premiss : ' Illud omne quod cogitat, est sive 
 existit.' (Everything which thinks, is or exists.) Of 
 course, he remarks, this major premiss itself has to be 
 deduced from the original statement. 
 
 The language of Descartes on the maxim that the ' I ' 
 which thinks must also at the same time be, his saying 
 that this connexion is given and implied in the simple 
 perception of consciousness, — that this connexion is the 
 absolute first, the principle, the most certain and evident 
 of all things, so that no scepticism can be conceived so 
 monstrous as not to admit it : — all this language is so 
 vivid and distinct, that the modern statements of Jacobi 
 and others on this immediate connexion can only pass 
 for needless repetitions. 
 
 65.] The theory of which we are speaking is not 
 satisfied when it has shown that mediate knowledge 
 taken separately is an adequate vehicle of truth. Its 
 distinctive doctrine is that immediate knowledge alone, 
 to the total exclusion of mediation, can possess a con- 
 tent which is true. This exclusiveness is enough to 
 show that the theory is a relapse into the metaphysical 
 understanding, with its pass-words ' Either — or.' And 
 thus it is really a relapse into the habit of external 
 mediation, the gist of which consists in clinging to those 
 narrow and one-sided categories of the finite, which it 
 falsely imagined itself to have left for ever behind. 
 This point, however, we shall not at present discuss in 
 
65-66.] EXCLUSIVENESS OF INTUITIONALISM. 129 
 
 detail. An exclusively immediate knowledge is asserted 
 as a fact only, and in the present Introduction we can 
 only study it from this external point of view. The real 
 significance of such knowledge will be explained, when 
 we come to the logical question of the opposition be- 
 tween mediate and immediate. But it is characteristic 
 of the view before us to decline to examine the nature 
 of the fact, that is, the notion of it ; for such an exami- 
 nation would itself be a step towards mediation and 
 even towards knowledge. The genuine discussion on 
 logical ground, therefore, must be deferred till we come 
 to the proper province of Logic itself. 
 
 The whole of the second part of Logic, the Doctrine 
 of Essential Being, is a discussion of the intrinsic and 
 self-aflfirming unity of immediacy and mediation. 
 
 66.] Beyond this point then we need not go : imme- 
 diate knowledge is to be accepted as a fact. Under 
 these circums'ances examination is directed to the field 
 of experience, to a psychological phenomenon. If that 
 be so, we need only note, as the commonest of ex- 
 periences, that truths, which we well know to be results 
 of complicated and highly mediated trains of thought, 
 present themselves immediately and without effort to 
 the mind of any man who is familiar with the subject. 
 The mathematician, like every one who has mastered 
 a particular science, meets any problem with ready-made 
 solutions which pre-suppose most complicated analyses: 
 and every educated man has a number of general views 
 and maxims which he can muster without trouble, but 
 which can only have sprung from frequent reflection 
 and long experience. The facility we attain in any sort 
 of knowledge, art, or technical expertness, consists in 
 having the particular knowledge or kind of action pre- 
 sent to our mind in any case that occurs, even we may 
 say, immediate in our very limbs, in an out-going 
 
 VOL. II K 
 
130 THIRD ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [66-67. 
 
 activity. In all these instances, immediacy of know- 
 ledge is so far from excluding mediation, that the 
 two things are linked together, — immediate knowledge 
 being actually the product and result of mediated know- 
 ledge. 
 
 It is no less obvious that immediate existence is bound 
 up with its mediation. The seed and the parents are 
 immediate and initial existences in respect of the off- 
 spring which they generate. But the seed and the 
 parents, though they exist and are therefore immediate, 
 are yet in their turn generated : and the child, without 
 prejudice to the mediation of its existence, is immediate, 
 because it is. The fact that I am in Berlin, my im- 
 mediate presence here, is mediated by my having made 
 the journey hither. 
 
 67.] One thing may be observed with reference to 
 the immediate knowledge of God, of legal and ethical 
 principles (including under the head of immediate know- 
 ledge, what is otherwise termed Instinct, Implanted or 
 Innate Ideas, Common Sense, Natural Reason, or 
 whatever form, in short, we give to the original spon- 
 taneity). It is a matter of general experience that 
 education or development is required to bring out into 
 consciousness what is therein contained. It was so 
 even with the Platonic reminiscence ; and the Christian 
 rite of baptism, although a sacrament, involves the 
 additional obligation of a Christian up-bringing. In 
 short, religion and morals, however much they may 
 be faith or immediate knowledge, are still on every 
 side conditioned by the mediating process which is 
 termed development, education, training. 
 
 The adherents, no less than the assailants, of the 
 doctrine of Innate Ideas have been guilty throughout 
 of the like exclusiveness and narrowness as is here 
 noted. They have drawn a hard and fast line between 
 
67.] INNATE IDEAS. 131 
 
 the essential and immediate union (as it may be de- 
 scribed) of certain universal principles with the soul, 
 and another union which has to be brought about in 
 an external fashion, and through the channel of given 
 objects and conceptions, There is one objection, 
 borrowed from experience, which was raised against 
 the doctrine of Innate ideas. All men, it was said, 
 must have these ideas ; they must have, for example, the 
 maxim of contradiction, present in the mind, — they must 
 be aware of it; for this maxim and others like it were 
 included in the class of Innate ideas. The objection 
 may be set down to misconception ; for the principles 
 in question, though innate, need not on that account 
 have the form of ideas or conceptions of something 
 we are aware of. Still, the objection completely meets 
 and overthrows the crude theory of immediate know- 
 ledge, which expressly maintains its formulae in so far 
 as they are in consciousness. — Another point calls for 
 notice. We may suppose it admitted by the intuitive 
 school, that the special case of religious faith involves 
 supplementing by a Christian or religious education 
 and development. In that case it is acting capriciously 
 when it seeks to ignore this admission when speaking 
 about faith, or it betrays a want of reflection not to 
 know, that, if the necessity of education be once ad- 
 mitted, mediation is pronounced indispensable. 
 
 The reminiscence of ideas spoken of by Plato is equiva- 
 lent to saying that ideas implicitly exist in man, instead of 
 being, as the Sophists assert, a foreign importation into his 
 mind. But to conceive knowledge as reminiscence does 
 not interfere with, or set aside as useless, the development 
 of what is implicitly in man ;— which development is another 
 word for mediation. The same holds good of the innate 
 ideas that we find in Descartes and the Scotch philosophers. 
 These ideas are only potential in the first instance, and 
 
 K 2 
 
132 THIRD ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [67-69. 
 
 should be looked at as being a sort of mere capacity in 
 man. 
 
 68.] In the case of these experiences the appeal 
 turns upon something that shows itself bound up with 
 immediate consc'ousness. Even if this combination be 
 in the first instance taken as an external and empirical 
 connexion, still, even for empirical observation, the fact 
 of its being constant shows it to be essential and in- 
 separable. But, agai.i, if this immediate conscious- 
 ness, as exhibited in experience, be taken separately, 
 so far as it is a consciousness of God and the divine 
 nature, the state of mind which it implies is generally 
 described as an exaltation above the finite, above the 
 senses, and above the instinctive desires and affections 
 of the natural heart : which exaltation passes over into, 
 and terminates in, faith in God and a divine order. 
 It is apparent, therefore, that, though faith may be 
 an immediate knowledge and certainty, it equally im- 
 plies the interposition of this process as its antecedent 
 and condition. 
 
 It has been already observed, that the so-called 
 proofs of the being of God, which start from finite 
 being, give an expression to this exaltation. In that 
 light they are no inventions of an over-subtle reflection, 
 but the necessary and native channel in which the 
 movement of mind runs : though it may be that, in 
 their ordinary form, these proofs have not their correct 
 and adequate expression. 
 
 69.] It is the passage (§ 64) from the subjective Idea 
 to being which forms the main concern of the doctrine 
 oi immediate knowledge. A primary and self-evident 
 inter-connexion is declared to exist between our Idea 
 and being. Yet precisely this central point of transi- 
 tion, utterly irrespective of any connexions which show 
 in experience, clearly involves a mediation. And the 
 
69-7 1 •] MEPIATE AND IMMEDIATE, 1 33 
 
 mediation is of no imperfect or unreal kind, where 
 the mediation takes place with and through something 
 external, but one comprehending both antecedent and 
 conclusion. 
 
 70.] For, what this theory asserts is that truth lies 
 neither in the Idea as a merely subjective thought, nor 
 in mere being on its own account ; — that mere being 
 per se, a being that is not of the Idea, is the sensible 
 finite being of the world. Now all this only affirms, 
 without demonstration, that the Idea has truth only 
 by means of being, and being has truth only by means 
 of the Idea. The maxim of immediate knowledge 
 rejects an indefinite empty immediacy (and such is 
 abstract being, or pure unity taken by itself), and 
 affirms in its stead the unity of the Idea with being. 
 And it acts rightly in so doing. But it is stupid not 
 to see that the unity of distinct terms or modes is not 
 irerely a purely im.mediate unity, i.e. unity empty and 
 indeterminate, but that— with equal emphasis— the one 
 term is shown to have truth only as mediated through 
 the other; — or, if the phrase be preferred, that either 
 term is only mediated with truth through the other. 
 That the quality of mediation is involved in the very 
 immediacy of intuition is thus exhibited as a fact, 
 against which understanding, conformably to the funda- 
 mental maxim of immediate knowledge that the evi- 
 dence of consciousness is infallible, can have nothing 
 to object. It is only ordinary abstract understanding 
 which takes the terms of mediation and immediacy, 
 each by itself absolutely, to represent an inflexible line 
 of distinction, and thus draws upon its own head the 
 hopeless task of reconciling them. The difficulty, as 
 we have shown, has no existence in the fact, and it 
 vanishes in the speculative notion. 
 
 71.] The one-sidedness of the intuitional school has 
 
134 TUIRD ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [71. 
 
 certain characteristics attending upon it, which we shall 
 proceed to point out in their main features, now that 
 we have discussed the fundamental principle. The 
 first of these corollaries is as follows. Since the crite- 
 rion of truth is found, not in the nature of the content, 
 but in the mere fact of consciousness, every alleged 
 truth has no other basis than subjective certitude and 
 the assertion that we discover a certain fact in our 
 consciousness. What I discover in my consciousness 
 is thus exaggerated into a fact of the consciousness of 
 all, and even passed off for the very nature of con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 Among the so-called proofs of the existence of God, 
 there used to stand the consensus gentium, to which 
 appeal is made as early as Cicero. The consensus 
 gentium is a weighty authority, and the transition is 
 easy and natural, from the circumstance that a certain 
 fact is found in the consciousness of every one, to the 
 conclusion that it is a necessary element in the very 
 nature of consciousness. In this category of general 
 agreement there was latent the deep-rooted perception, 
 which does not escape even the least cultivated mind, 
 that the consciousness of the individual is at the same 
 time particular and accidental. Yet unless we examine 
 the nature of this consciousness itself, stripping it of 
 its particular and accidental elements and, by the toil- 
 some operation of reflection, disclosing the universal 
 in its entirety and purity, it is only a unanimous agree- 
 ment upon a given point that can authorize a decent 
 presumption that that point is part of the very nature 
 of consciousness. Of course, if thought insists on 
 seeing the necessity of what is presented as a fact of 
 general occurrence, the consensus gentium is certainly 
 not sufficient. Yet even granting the universality of 
 the fact to be a satisfactory proof, it has been found 
 
71.] THE CONSENSUS GENTIUM. I35 
 
 impossible to establish the belief in God on such an 
 argument, because experience shows that there are 
 individuals and nations without any such faith '. But 
 there can be nothing shorter and more convenient than 
 to have the bare assertion to make, that we discover 
 a fact in our consciousness, and are certain that it is 
 true : and to declare that this certainty, instead of 
 proceeding from our particular mental constitution only, 
 belongs to the very nature of the mind. 
 
 ^ In order to judge of the greater or less extent to which Experi- 
 ence shows cases of Atheism or of the belief in God, it is all-important 
 to know if the mere general conception of deity suffices, or if a more 
 definite knowledge of God is required. The Christian world would 
 certainly refuse the title of God to the idols of the Hindoos and the 
 Chinese, to the fetiches of the Africans, and even to the gods of 
 Greece themselves. If so, a believer in these idols would not be a 
 believer in God. If it were contended, on the other hand, that such 
 a belief in idols implies some sort of belief in God, as the species 
 implies the genus, then idolatry would argue not faith in an idol 
 merely, but faith in God. The Athenians took an opposite view. 
 The poets and philosophers who explained Zeus to be a cloud, and 
 maintained that there was only one God, were treated as atheists 
 at Athens. 
 
 The danger in these questions lies in looking at what the mind 
 may make out of an object, and not what that object actually and 
 explicitly is. If we fail to note this distinction, the commonest per- 
 ceptions of men's senses will be religion : for every such perception, 
 and indeed every act of mind, implicitly contains the principle which, 
 when it is purified and developed, rises to religion. But to be 
 capable of religion is one thing, to have it another. And religion yet 
 implicit is only a capacity or a possibility. 
 
 Thus in modem times, travellers have found tribes (as Captains 
 Ross and Parry found the Esquimaux) which, as they tell us, have 
 not even that small modicum of religion possessed by African sor- 
 cerers, the goetes of Herodotus. On the other hand, an Englishman, 
 who spent the first months of the last Jubilee at Rome, says, in his 
 account of the modern Romans, that the common people are bigots, 
 whilst those who can read and write are atheists to a man. 
 
 The charge of Atheism is seldom heard in modern times : prin- 
 cipally because the facts and the requirements of religion are reduced 
 to a minimum. (See § 73.) 
 
136 THIRD ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [72-74. 
 
 72.] A second corollary which results from holding 
 immediacy of consciousness to be the criterion of truth 
 is that all superstition or idolatry is allowed to be truth, 
 and that an apology is prepared for any contents of 
 the will, however wrong and immoral. It is because 
 he believes in them, and not from the reasoning and 
 syllogism of what is termed mediate knowledge, that 
 the Hindoo finds God in the cow, the monkey, the 
 Brahmin, or the Lama. But the natural desires and 
 affections spontaneously carry and deposit their interests 
 in consciousness, where also immoral aims make them- 
 selves naturally at home : the good or bad character 
 would thus express the definite being of the will, which 
 would be known, and that most immediately, in the 
 interests and aims. 
 
 73.] Thirdly and lastly, the immediate consciousness 
 of God goes no further than to tell us that He is : to tell 
 us ivhat He is, would be an act of cognition, involving 
 mediation. So that God as an object of religion is 
 expressly narrowed down to the indeterminate super- 
 sensible, God in general : and the significance of re- 
 ligion is reduced to a minimum. 
 
 If it were really needful to win back and secure the 
 bare belief that there is a God, or even to create it, 
 we might well wonder at the poverty of the age which 
 can see a gain in the merest pittance of religious con- 
 sciousness, and which in its church has sunk so low as 
 to worship at the altar that stood in Athens long ago, 
 dedicated to the ' Unknown God.' 
 
 74.] We have still briefly to indicate the general 
 nature of the form of immediacy. For it is the essential 
 one-sidedness of the category, which makes whatever 
 comes under it one sided and, for that reason, finite. 
 And, first, it makes the universal no better than an 
 abstraction external to the particulars, and God a being 
 
7-i.] MEDIATE AND IMMEDIATE. 137 
 
 without determinate quality. But God can only be 
 called a spirit when He is known to be at once the 
 beginning and end, as well as the mean, in the process 
 of mediation. Without this unification of elements He 
 is neither concrete, nor living, nor a spirit. Thus the 
 knowledge of God as a spirit necessarily implies media- 
 tion. The form of immediacy, secondly, invests the 
 particular with the character of independent or self- 
 centred being. But such predicates contradict the very 
 essence of the particular, — which is to be referred to 
 something else outside. They thus invest the finite 
 with the character of an absolute. But, besides, the 
 form of immediacy is altogether abstract : it has no 
 preference for one set of contents more than another, 
 but is equally susceptible of all : it may as well sanction 
 what is idolatrous and immoral as the reverse. Only 
 when we discern that the content, — the particular, is not 
 self-subsistent, but derivative from something else, are 
 its finitude and untruth shown in their proper light. 
 Such discernment, where the content we discern carries 
 with it the ground of its dependent nature, is a know- 
 ledge which involves mediation. The only content 
 which can be held to be the truth is one not mediated 
 with something else, not limited by other things : or, 
 otherwise expressed, it is one mediated by itself, where 
 mediation and immediate reference-to-self coincide. The 
 understanding that fancies it has got clear of finite 
 knowledge, the identity of the analytical metaphysicians 
 and the old ' rationalists,' abruptly takes again as prin- 
 ciple and criterion of truth that immediacy which, as 
 an abstract reference-to-self, is the same as abstract 
 identity. Abstract thought (the scientific form used 
 by ' reflective ' metaphysic) and abstract intuition (the 
 form used by immediate knowledge) are one and the 
 same. 
 
138 THIRD ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [74-76. 
 
 The stereotyped opposition between the form of im- 
 mediacy and that of mediation gives to the former a half- 
 ness and inadequacy, that affects every content which is 
 brought under it. Immediacy means, upon the whole, an 
 abstract reference-to-self, that is, an abstract identity or 
 abstract universaHty. Accordingly the essential and real 
 universal, when taken merely in its immediacy, is a mere 
 abstract universal ; and from this point of view God is con- 
 ceived as a being altogether without determinate quality. 
 To call God spirit is in that case only a phrase: for the 
 consciousness and self-consciousness, which spirit implies, 
 are impossible without a distinguishing of it from itself and 
 from something else, i.e. without mediation. 
 
 75.] It was impossible for us to criticise this, the 
 third attitude, which thought has been made to take 
 towards objective truth, in any other mode than what 
 is naturally indicated and admitted in the doctrine itself. 
 The theory asserts that immediate knowledge is a fact. 
 It has been shown to be untrue in fact to say that there 
 is an immediate knowledge, a knowledge without media- 
 tion either by means of something else or in itself. It 
 has also been explained to be false in fact to say that 
 thought advances through finite and conditioned cate- 
 gories only, which are always mediated by a something 
 else, and to forget that in the very act of mediation 
 the mediation itself vanishes. And to show that, in 
 point of fact, there is a knowledge which advances 
 neither by unmixed immediacy nor by unmixed media- 
 tion, we can point to the example of Logic and the 
 whole of philosophy. 
 
 76.] Ifwe view the maxims of immediate knowledge 
 in connexion with the uncritical metaphysic of the past 
 from which we started, we shall learn from the com- 
 parison the reactionary nature of the school of Jacobi. 
 His doctrine is a return to the modern starting-point 
 of this metaphysic in the Cartesian philosophy. Both 
 
76.] JACOBI AND DESCARTES. I39 
 
 Jacobi and Descartes maintain the following three 
 points : 
 
 (i) The simple inseparability of the thought and 
 being of the thinker. ' Cogito, ergo sum ' is the same 
 doctrine as that the being, reality, and existence of the 
 ' Ego ' is immediately revealed to me in consciousness. 
 (Descartes, in fact, is careful to state that by thought 
 he means consciousness in general. Princip. Phil. I. 9.) 
 This inseparability is the absolutely first and most cer- 
 tain knowledge, not mediated or demonstrated. 
 
 (2) The inseparability of existence from the con- 
 ception of God : the former is necessarily implied in 
 the latter, or the conception never can be without 
 the attribute of existence, which is thus necessary and 
 eternaP. 
 
 * Descartes, Princip. Phil. I. 15 : Magi's hoc {ens sumnte perfectutti 
 exisiere) credet, si atiendat, nullius alterius ret ideam apud se inveniri, 
 in qua eodem ntodo necessariam existentiam contineri anintadvertat ; — 
 intelliget illam ideam exhibere veram et immutabilem tiaturam, quaeque 
 non potest tion existere, cunt necessaria existentia in ea conttneatur. 
 (The reader will be more disposed to believe that there exists a being 
 supremely perfect, if he notes that in the case of nothing else is 
 there found in him an idea, in which he notices necessary existence 
 to be contained in the same way. He will see that that idea exhibits 
 a true and unchangeable nature, — a nature which cannot btit exist, 
 since necessary existence is contained in if.) A remark which imme- 
 diately follows, and which sounds like mediation or demonstration, 
 does not really prejudice the original principle. 
 
 In Spinoza we come upon the same statement that the essence or 
 abstract conception of God implies existence. The first of Spinoza's 
 definitions, that of the Causa Sui (or Self-Cause), explains it to be 
 atjus essentia invohit existentiam, sive id a<jus natura non potest con- 
 cipi nisi existens ^^that of which the essence involves existence, or that 
 whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing). The insepa- 
 rability of the notion from being is the main point and fundamental 
 hypothesis in his system. But what notion is thus inseparable from 
 being? Not the notion of finite things, for they are so constituted as 
 to have a contingent and a created existence. Spinoza's nth propo- 
 sition, which follows with a proof that God exists necessarily, and 
 
I40 THIRD ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [76-77. 
 
 (3) The immediate consciousness of the existence of 
 external things. By this nothing more is meant than 
 sense-consciousness. To have such a thing is the 
 slightest of all cognitions : and the only thing worth 
 knowing about it is that such immediate knowledge 
 of the being of things external is error and delusion, 
 that the sensible world as such is altogether void of 
 truth ; that the being of these external things is acci- 
 dental and passes away as a show ; and that their very 
 nature is to have only an existence which is separable 
 from their essence and notion. 
 
 77.] There is however a distinction between the two 
 points of view : 
 
 (i) The Cartesian philosophy, from these unproved 
 postulates, which it assumes to be unprovable, proceeds 
 to wider and wider details of knowledge, and thus gave 
 rise to the sciences of modern times. The modern 
 theory (of Jacobi), on the contrary, (§ 62) has come to 
 what is intrinsically a most important conclusion that 
 cognition, proceeding as it must by finite mediations, 
 can know only the finite, and never embody the truth ; 
 and would fain have the consciousness of God go no 
 further than the aforesaid very abstract belief that 
 God is"^. 
 
 his 20th, showing that God's existence and his essence are one and 
 the same, are really superfluous, and the proof is more in form than 
 in reality. To say, that God is Substance, the only Substance, and 
 that, as Substance is Causa Sui, God therefore exists necessarily, is 
 merely stating that God is that of which the notion and the being 
 are inseparable. 
 
 ' Anselm on the contrary says : NegUgentiae ntihi videiur, si post- 
 quant conjimuiti sumus in fide, non studemus, quod credimus, intelligere. 
 (Methinks it is carelessness, if, after we have been confirmed in the 
 faith, we do not exert ourselves to see the meaning 0/ what we believe.) 
 [Tractat. Cur Deus Homol] These words of Anselm, in connexion 
 with the concrete truths of Christian doctrine, offer a far harder 
 problem for investigation, than is contemplated by this modern faith. 
 
77-78-] JACOBI AND DESCARTES. 141 
 
 (2) The modern doctrine on the one hand makes no 
 change in the Cartesian method of the usual scientific 
 knowledge, and conducts on the same plan the experi- 
 mental and finiie sciences that have sprung from it. 
 But, on the other hand, when it comes to the science 
 which has infinity for its scope, it throws aside that 
 method, and thus, as it knows no other, it rejects all 
 methods. It abandons itself to wild vagaries of imagin- 
 ation and assertion, to a moral priggishness and senti- 
 mental arrogance, or to a reckless dogmatising and lust 
 of argument, which is loudest against philosophy and 
 philosophic doctrines. Pnilosophy of course tolerates 
 no mere assertions or conceits, and checks the free 
 play of argumentative see-saw. 
 
 78.] We must then reject the opposition between an 
 independent immediacy in the contents or facts of con- 
 sciousness and an equally independent mediation, sup- 
 posed incompatible with the former. The incompatibility 
 is a mere assumption, an arbitrary assertion. All other 
 assumptions and postulates must in like manner be left 
 behind at the entrance to philosophy, whether they are 
 derived from the intellect cr the imagination. For philo- 
 sophy is the science, in which every such proposition 
 must first be scrutinised and its meaning and opposi- 
 tions be ascertained. 
 
 Scepticism, made a negative science and systematically 
 applied to all forms of knowledge, might seem a suit- 
 able introduction, as pointing out the nullity of such 
 assumptions. But a sceptical introduction would be 
 not only an ungrateful but also a useless course ; 
 and that because Dialectic, as we shall soon make 
 appear, is itself an ess ntial element of affirmative 
 science. Scepticism, besides, could only get hold of 
 the finite forms as they were suggested by experience, 
 taking them as given, instead of deducing them scientifi- 
 
142 THIRD ATTITUDE TO OBJECTIVITY. [78. 
 
 cally. To require such a scepticism accomplished is 
 the same as to insist on science being preceded by 
 universal doubt, or a total absence of presupposition. 
 Strictly speaking, in the resolve that wills pure thought, 
 this requirement is accomplished by freedom which, 
 abstracting from everything, grasps its pure abstraction, 
 the simplicity of thought- 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 LOGIC FURTHER DEFINED AND DIVIDED. 
 
 79.] In point of form Logical doctrine has three sides : 
 (a) the Abstract side, or that of understanding : (/?) the 
 Dialectical, or that of negative reason : (y) the Specula- 
 tive, or that of positive reason. 
 
 These three sides do not make three parts of logic, 
 but are stages or ' moments ' in every logical entity, that 
 is, of every notion and truth whatever. They may all 
 be put under the first stage, that of understanding, 
 and so kept isolated from each other ; but this would 
 give an inadequate conception of them. — The state- 
 ment of the dividing lines and the characteristic aspects 
 of logic is at this point no more than historical and anti- 
 cipatory. 
 
 80.] (a) Thought, as Understanding, sticks to fixity 
 of characters and their distinctness from one another : 
 every such limited abstract it treats as having a sub- 
 sistence and being of its own. 
 
 In our ordinary usage of the term thought and even 
 notion, we often have before our eyes nothing more than 
 the operation of Understanding. And no doubt thought is 
 primarily an exercise of Understanding:— only it goes 
 further, and the notion is not a function of Understanding 
 merely. The action of Understanding may be in general 
 described as investing its subject-matter with the form of 
 universality. But this universal is an abstract universal : 
 that is to say, its opposition to the particular is so rigorously 
 
144 LOGIC DEFINED AND DIVIDED. [80. 
 
 maintained, that it is at the same time also reduced to the 
 character of a particular again. In this separating and 
 abstracting attitude towards its objects, Understanding is the 
 reverse of immediate perception and sensation, which, as 
 such, keep completely to their native sphere of action in 
 the concrete. 
 
 It is by referring to this opposition of Understanding to 
 sensation or feeling that we must explain the frequent 
 attacks made upon thought for being hard and narrow, and 
 for leading, if consistently developed, to ruinous and 
 pernicious results. The answer to these charges, in so far 
 as they are warranted by their facts, is, that they do not 
 touch thinking in general, certainly not the thinking of 
 Reason, but only the exercise of Understanding. It must 
 be added however, that the merit and rights of the mere 
 Understanding should unhesitatingly be admitted. And 
 that merit lies in the fact, that apart from Understanding 
 there is no fixity or accuracj' in the region either of theory 
 or of practice. 
 
 Thus, in theory, knowledge begins by apprehending 
 existing objects in their specific differences. In the study of 
 nature, for example, we distinguish matters, forces, genera 
 and the like, and stereotype each in its isolation. Thought 
 is here acting in its analytic capacity, where its canon is 
 identity, a simple reference of each attribute to itself It is 
 under the guidance of the same identity that the process in 
 knowledge is effected from one scientific truth to another. 
 Thus, for example, in mathematics magnitude is the feature 
 which, to the neglect of any other, determines our advance. 
 Hence in geometry we compare one figure with another, 
 so as to bring out their identity. Similarly in other fields of 
 knowledge, such as jurisprudence, the advance is primarily 
 regulated by identity. In it we argue from one specific law 
 or precedent to another : and what is this but to proceed on 
 the principle of identity ? 
 
 But Understanding is as indispensable in practice as it is 
 in theory. Character is an essential in conduct, and a man 
 of character is an understanding man, who in that capacity 
 has definite ends in view and undeviatingly pursues them. 
 
8o.] LOGIC OF UNDERSTANDING. 145 
 
 The man who will do something great must learn, as Goethe 
 says, to limit himself. The man who, on the contrary, would 
 do everything, really would do nothing, and fails. There is 
 a host of interesting things in the world : Spanish poetry, 
 chemistry, politics, and music are all very interesting, and if 
 any one takes an interest in them we need not find fault. 
 But for a person in a given situation to accomplish anything, 
 he must stick to one definite point, and not dissipate his 
 forces ih many directions. In every calling, too, the great 
 thing is to pursue it with understanding. Thus the judge 
 must stick to the law, and give his verdict in accordance with 
 it, undeterred by one motive or another, allowing no excuses,, 
 and looking neither left nor right. Understanding, too, is 
 always an element in thorough training. The trained 
 intellect is not satisfied with cloudy and indefinite impres- 
 sions, but grasps the objects in their fixed character : where- 
 as the uncultivated man wavers unsettled, and it often costs 
 a deal of trouble to come to an understanding with him on 
 the matter under discussion, and to bring him to fix his eye 
 on the definite point in question. 
 
 It has been already explained that the Logical principle in 
 general, far from being merely a subjective action in our 
 minds, is rather the very universal, which as such is also 
 objective. This doctrine is illustrated in the case of under- 
 standing, the first form of logical truths. Understanding in 
 this larger sense corresponds to what we call the goodness 
 of God, so far as that means that finite things are and sub- 
 sist. In nature, for example, we recognise the goodness of 
 God in the fact that the various classes or species of animals 
 and plants are provided with whatever they need for their 
 preservation and welfare. Nor is man excepted, who, both 
 as an individual and as a nation, possesses partly in the 
 given circumstances of climate, of quality and products of 
 soil, and partly in his natural parts or talents, all that is 
 required for his maintenance and development. Under this 
 shape Understanding is visible in every department of the 
 objective world ; and no object in that world can ever be 
 wholly perfect which does not give full satisfaction to the 
 canons of understanding. A state, for example, is imperfect, 
 
 VOL. II. L 
 
146 LOGIC DEFINED AND DIVIDED. [80. 
 
 so long as it has not reached a clear differentiation of orders 
 and callings, and so long as those functions of politics and 
 government, which are different in principle, have not 
 evolved for themselves special organs, in the same way as 
 we see, for example, the developed animal organism pro- 
 vided with separate organs for the functions of sensation, 
 motion, digestion, &c. 
 
 The previous course of the discussion may serve to show, 
 that understanding is indispensable even in those spheres 
 and regions of action which the popular fancy would deem 
 furthest from it, and that in proportion as understanding is 
 absent from them, imperfection is the result. This parti- 
 cularly holds good of Art, Religion, and Philosophy. In 
 Art, for example, understanding is visible where the forms 
 of beauty, which differ in principle, are kept distinct and 
 exhibited in their purity. The same thing holds good also 
 of single works of art. It is part of the beauty and perfection 
 of a dramatic poem that the characters of the several 
 persons should be closely and faithfully maintained, and 
 that the different aims and interests involved should be 
 plainly and decidedly exhibited. Or again, take the province 
 of Religion. The superiority of Greek over Northern 
 mythology (apart from other differences of subject-matter 
 and conception) mainly consists in this : that in the former 
 the individual gods are fashioned into forms of sculpture-like 
 distinctness of outHne, while in the latter the figures fade 
 away vaguely and hazily into one another. Lastly comes 
 Philosophy. That Philosophy never can get on without 
 the understanding hardly calls for special remark after what 
 has been said. Its foremost requirement is that every 
 thought shall be grasped in its full precision, and nothing 
 allowed to remain vague and indefinite. 
 
 It is usually added that understanding must not go too 
 far. Which is so far correct, that understanding is not an 
 ultimate, but on the contrary finite, and so constituted that 
 when carried to extremes it veers round to its opposite. It 
 is the fashion of youth to dash about in abstractions: but the 
 man who has learnt to know life steers clear of the abstract 
 ' either — or,' arid keeps to the concrete. 
 
8i.] DIALECTIC. 147 
 
 81.] (/?) In the Dialectical stage these finite charac- 
 terisations or formulae supersede themselves, and pass 
 into their opposites. 
 
 (i) But when the Dialectical principle is employed 
 by the understanding separately and independently, — 
 especially as seen in its application to philosophical 
 theories. Dialectic becomes Scepticism ; in which the 
 result that ensues from its action is presented as a 
 mere negation. 
 
 (2) It is customary to treat Dialectic as an adven- 
 titious art, which for very wantonness introduces con- 
 fusion and a mere semblance of contradiction into 
 definite notions. And in that light, the semblance is 
 the nonentity, while the true reality is supposed to be- 
 long to the original dicta of understanding. Often, 
 indeed. Dialectic is nothing more than a subjective see- 
 saw of arguments pro and con, where the absence of 
 sterling thought is disguised by the subtlety which gives 
 birth to such arguments. But in its true and proper 
 character. Dialectic is the very nature and essence of 
 everything predicated by mere understanding, — the law 
 of things and of the finite as a whole. Dialectic is 
 different from 'Reflection.' In the first instance, Reflec- 
 tion is that movement out beyond the isolated predicate 
 of a thing which gives it some reference, and brings out 
 its relativity, while still in other respects leaving it its 
 isolated validity. But by Dialectic is meant the in- 
 dwelling tendency outwards by which the one-sidedness 
 and limitation of the predicates of understanding is seen 
 in its true light, and shown to be the negation of them. 
 For anything to be finite is just to suppress itself and put 
 itself aside. Thus understood the Dialectical principle 
 constitutes the life and soul of scientific progress, the 
 dynamic which alone gives immanent connexion and 
 necessity to the body of science ; and, in a word, is seen 
 
 L 2 
 
148 LOGIC DEFINED AND DIVIDED. [8x. 
 
 to constitute the real and true, as opposed to the ex- 
 ternal, exaltation above the finite. 
 
 (i) It is of the highest importance to ascertain and under- 
 stand rightly the nature of Dialectic. Wherever there is 
 movement, wherever there is hfe, wherever anything is 
 carried into effect in the actual world, there Dialectic is at 
 work. It is also the soul of all knowledge which is truly 
 scientific. In the popular way of looking at things, the 
 refusal to be bound by the abstract deliverances of under- 
 standing appears as fairness, which, according to the proverb 
 Live and let live, demands that each should have its turn ; 
 we admit the one, but we admit the other also. But when 
 we look more closely, we find that the limitations of the 
 finite do not merely come from without ; that its own nature 
 is the cause of its abrogation, and that by its own act it 
 passes into its counterpart. We say, for instance, that man 
 is mortal, and seem to think that the ground of his death is 
 in external circumstances only ; so that if this way of 
 looking were correct, man would have two special properties, 
 vitality and— also— mortality. But the true view of the matter 
 is that life, as life, involves the germ of death, and that the 
 finite, being radically self-contradictory, involves its own 
 self-suppression. 
 
 Nor, again, is Dialectic to be confounded with mere 
 Sophistry. The essence of Sophistry lies in giving authority 
 to a partial and abstract principle, in its isolation, as may 
 suit the interest and particular situation of the individual 
 at the time. For example, a regard to my existence, and 
 my having the means of existence, is a vital motive of conduct, 
 but if I exclusively emphasise this consideration or motive 
 of my welfare, and draw the conclusion that I may steal or 
 betray my country, we have a case of Sophistry. Similarly, 
 it is a vital principle in conduct that I should be sub- 
 jectively free, that is to say, that I should have an insight 
 into what I am doing, and a conviction that it is right. But 
 if my pleading insists on this principle alone I fall into 
 Sophistry, such as would overthrow all the principles of 
 morality. From this sort of party-pleading Dialectic is 
 
8 1.] DIALECTIC. I49 
 
 wholly diiferent ; its purpose is to study things in their own 
 being and movement and thus to demonstrate the finitude of 
 the partial categories of understanding. 
 
 Dialectic, it may be added, is no novelty in philosophy. 
 Among the ancients Plato is termed the inventor of 
 Dialectic ; and his right to the name rests on the fact, that 
 the Platonic philosophy first gave the free scientific, and 
 thus at the same time the objective, form to Dialectic. 
 Socrates, as we should expect from the general character 
 of his philosophising, has the dialectical element in a pre- 
 dominantly subjective shape, that of Irony. He used to 
 turn his Dialectic, first against ordinary consciousness, and 
 then especially against the Sophists. In his conversations 
 he used to simulate the wish for some clearer knowledge 
 about the subject under discussion, and after putting all 
 sorts of questions with that intent, he drew on those with 
 whom he conversed to the opposite of what their first im- 
 pressions had pronounced correct. If, for instance, the 
 Sophists claimed to be teachers, Socrates by a series of 
 questions forced the Sophist Protagoras to confess that all 
 learning is only recollection. In his more strictly scientific 
 dialogues Plato employs the dialectical method to show the 
 finitude of all hard and fast terms of understanding. Thus 
 in the Parmenides he deduces the many from the one, and 
 shows nevertheless that the many cannot but define itself 
 as the one. In this grand style did Plato treat Dialectic. / In 
 modern times it was, more than any other, Kant who re- 
 suscitated the name of Dialectic, and restored it to its post 
 of honour, j He did it, as we have seen (§ 48), by working 
 out the Antinomies of the reason. The problem of these 
 Antinomies is no mere subjective piece of work oscillating 
 between one set of grounds and another ; it really serves 
 to show that every abstract proposition of understanding, 
 taken precisely as it is given, naturally veers round into its 
 opposite. 
 
 However reluctant Understanding may be to admit the 
 action of Dialectic, we must not suppose that the recognition 
 of its existence is peculiarly confined to the philosopher. 
 It would be truer to say that Dialectic gives expression to a 
 
150 LOGIC DEFINED AND DIVIDED. [81. 
 
 law which is felt in all other grades of consciousness, and 
 in general experience. Everything that surrounds us may 
 be viewed as an instance of Dialectic. We are aware that 
 everything finite, instead of being stable and ultimate, is 
 rather changeable and transient; and this is exactly what 
 we mean by that Dialectic of the finite, by which the finite, as 
 implicitly other than what it is, is forced beyond its own im- 
 mediate or natural being to turn suddenly into its opposite. 
 We have before this (§ 80) identified Understanding with 
 what is imphed in the popular idea of the goodness of God ; 
 we may now remark of Dialectic, in the same objective sig- 
 nification, that its principle answers to the idea of his power. 
 All things, we say,— that is, the finite world as such,— are 
 doomed ; and in saying so, we have a vision of Dialectic as 
 the universal and irresistible power before which nothing 
 can stay, however secure and stable it may deem itself. 
 The category of power does not, it is true, exhaust the depth 
 of the divine nature or the notion of God ; but it certainly 
 forms a vital element in all rehgious consciousness. 
 
 Apart from this general objectivity of Dialectic, we find 
 traces of its presence in each of the particular provinces 
 and phases of the natural and the spiritual world. Take as 
 an illustration the motion of the heavenly bodies. At this 
 moment the planet stands in this spot, but implicitly it is the 
 possibility of being in another spot; and that possibility of 
 being otherwise the planet brings into existence by moving. 
 Similarly the 'physical' elements prove to be Dialectical. 
 The process of meteorological action is the exhibition of 
 their Dialectic. It is the same dynamic that lies at the root 
 of every other natural process, and, as it were, forces nature 
 out of itself. To illustrate the presence of Dialectic in the 
 spiritual world, especially in the provinces of law and mo- 
 rality, we have only to recollect how general experience 
 shows us the extreme of one state or action suddenly shift- 
 ing into its opposite : a Dialectic which is recognised in 
 many ways in common proverbs. Thus surnmum jus 
 summa injuria: which means, that to drive an abstract 
 right to its extremity is to do a wrong. In political life, 
 as every one knows, extreme anarchy and extreme despot- 
 
8r.] DIALECTIC AND SCEPTICISM. 151 
 
 ism naturally lead to one another. The perception of Dia- 
 lectic in the province of individual Ethics is seen in the 
 well-known adages, Pride comes before a fall : Too much 
 wit outwits itself Even feeling, bodily as well as mental, 
 has its Dialectic. Every one knows how the extremes of 
 pain and pleasure pass into each other : the heart overflow- 
 ing with joy seeks relief in tears, and the deepest melan- 
 choly will at times betray its presence bj' a smile. 
 
 (2) Scepticism should not be looked upon merely as a 
 doctrine of doubt. It would be more correct to say that the 
 Sceptic has no doubt of his point, which is the nothingness 
 of all finite existence. He who only doubts still clings to 
 the hope that his doubt may be resolved, and that one or 
 other of the definite views, between which he wavers, will 
 turn out solid and true. Scepticism properly so called is a 
 very different thing : it is complete hopelessness about all 
 which understanding counts stable, and the feeling to which 
 it gives birth is one of unbroken calmness and inward re- 
 pose. Such at least is the noble Scepticism of antiquity, 
 especially as exhibited in the writings of Sextus Empiricus, 
 when in the later times of Rome it had been systematised as 
 a complement to the dogmatic systems of Stoic and Epi- 
 curean. Of far other stamp, and to be strictly distinguished 
 from it, is the modern Scepticism already mentioned § (39), 
 which partly preceded the Critical Philosophy, and partly 
 sprung out of it. That later Scepticism consisted solely in 
 denying the truth and certitude of the super-sensible, and in 
 pointing to the facts of sense and of immediate sensations as 
 what we have to keep to. 
 
 Even to this day Scepticism is often spoken of as the 
 irresistible enemy of all positive knowledge, and hence of 
 philosophy, in so far as philosophy is concerned with posi- 
 tive knowledge. But in these statements there is a miscon- 
 ception. It is only the finite thought of abstract understand- 
 ing which has to fear Scepticism, because unable to with- 
 stand it : philosophy includes the sceptical principle as a 
 subordinate function of its own, in the shape of Dialectic. 
 In contradistinction to mere Scepticism, however, philosophy 
 does not remain content with the purely negative result of 
 
152 LOGIC DEFINED AND DIVIDED. [81-82. 
 
 Dialectic. The sceptic mistakes the true value of his result, 
 when he supposes it to be no more than a negation pure and 
 simple. For the negative, which emerges as the result of 
 dialectic, is, because a result, at the same time the positive : 
 it contains what it results from, absorbed into itself, and 
 made part of its own nature. Thus conceived, however, 
 the dialectical stage has the features characterising the third 
 grade of logical truth, the speculative form, or form of posi- 
 tive reason. 
 
 82.] (y) The Speculative stage, or stage of Positive 
 Reason, apprehends the unity of terms (propositions) 
 in their opposition, — the affirmative, which is involved 
 in their disintegration and in their transition. 
 
 (i) The result of Dialectic is positive, because it has 
 a definite content, or because its result is not empty and 
 abstract nothing, but the negation of certain specific 
 propositions which are contained in the result, — for the 
 very reason that it is a resultant and not an immediate no- 
 thing. (2) It follows from this that the 'reasonable' 
 result, though it be only a thought and abstract, is still 
 a concrete, being not a plain formal unity, but a unity 
 of distinct propositions. Bare abstractions or formal 
 thoughts are therefore no business of philosophy, which 
 has to deal only with concrete thoughts. (3) The logic 
 of mere Understanding is involved in Speculative logic, 
 and can at will be elicited from it, by the simple process 
 of omitting the dialectical and 'reasonable' element. 
 When that is done, it becomes what the common logic 
 is, a descriptive collection of sundry thought-forms and 
 rules which, finite though they are, are taken to be some- 
 thing infinite. 
 
 If we consider only what it contains, and not how it con- 
 tains it, the true reason-world, so far from being the exclu- 
 sive property of philosophy, is the right of every human 
 being on whatever grade of culture or mental growth he 
 
8a.] SPECULATIVE LOGIC. 1 53 
 
 may stand ; which would justify man's ancient title of ra- 
 tional being. The general mode by which experience first 
 makes us aware of the reasonable order of things is by 
 accepted and unreasoned belief; and the character of the 
 rational, as already noted (§ 45), is to be unconditioned, and 
 thus to be self-contained, self-determining. In this sense 
 man above all things becomes aware of the reasonable order, 
 when he knows of God, and knows Him to be the completely 
 self-determined. Similarly, the consciousness a citizen has 
 of his country and its laws is a perception of the reason- 
 world, so long as he looks up to them as unconditioned and 
 likewise universal powers, to which he must subject his in- 
 dividual will. And in the same sense, the knowledge and 
 will of the child is rational, w^hen he knows his parents' 
 will, and wills it. 
 
 Now, to turn these rational (of course positively-rational) 
 reahties into speculative principles, the only thing needed is 
 that they be thought. The expression ' Speculation ' in 
 common life is often used with a very vague and at the 
 same time secondary sense, as when we speak of a matri- 
 monial or a commercial speculation. By this we only 
 mean two things : first, that what is immediately at hand 
 has to be passed and left behind ; and secondly, that the 
 subject-matter of such speculations, though in the first place 
 only subjective, must not remain so, but be realised or 
 translated into objectivity. 
 
 What was some time ago remarked respecting the Idea, 
 may be applied to this common usage of the term ' specula- 
 tion ' : and we may add that people who rank themselves 
 amongst the educated expressly speak of speculation even 
 as if it were something purely subjective. A certain theory 
 of some conditions and circumstances of nature or mind may 
 be, say these people, very fine and correct as a matter of 
 speculation, but it contradicts experience and nothing of the 
 sort is admissible in reality. To this the answer is, that the 
 speculative is in its true signification, neither preliminarily 
 nor even definitively, something merely subjective : that, on 
 the contrary, it expressly rises above such oppositions as 
 that between subjective and objective, which the under- 
 
154 LOGIC DEFINED AND DIVIDED. [82. 
 
 standing cannot get over, and absorbing them in itself, 
 evinces its own concrete and all-embracing nature. A one- 
 sided proposition therefore can never even give expression 
 to a speculative truth. If we say, for example, that the 
 absolute is the unity of subjective and objective, we are 
 undoubtedly in the right, but so far one-sided, as we enun- 
 ciate the unity only and lay the accent upon it, forgetting 
 that in reality the subjective and objective are not merely 
 identical but also distinct. 
 
 Speculative truth, it may also be noted, means very much 
 the same as what, in special connexion with religious ex- 
 perience and doctrines, used to be called Mysticism. The 
 term Mysticism is at present used, as a rule, to designate 
 what is mysterious and incomprehensible: and in propor- 
 tion as their general culture and way of thinking vary, the 
 epithet is applied by one class to denote the real and the 
 true, by another to name everything connected with super- 
 stition and deception. On which we first of all remark that 
 there is mystery in the mystical, only however for the un- 
 derstanding which is ruled by the principle of abstract 
 identity ; whereas the mystical, as synonymous with the 
 speculative, is the concrete unity of those propositions, 
 which understanding only accepts in their separation and 
 opposition. And if those who recognise Mysticism as the 
 highest truth are content to leave it in its original utter 
 mystery, their conduct only proves that for them too, as 
 well as for their antagonists, thinking means abstract iden- 
 tification, and that in their opinion, therefore, truth can only 
 be won by renouncing thought, or as it is frequently ex- 
 pressed, by leading the reason captive. But, as we have 
 seen, the abstract thinking of understanding is so far from 
 being either ultimate or stable, that it shows a perpetual 
 tendency to work its own dissolution and swing round into 
 its opposite. Reasonableness, on the contrary, just consists 
 in embracing within itself these opposites as unsubstantial 
 elements. Thus the reason-world may be equally styled 
 mystical,— not however because thought cannot both reach 
 and comprehend it, but merely because it lies beyond the 
 compass of understanding. 
 
83.] SUBDIVISIONS OF LOGIC. 155 
 
 83.] Logic is subdivided into three parts : — 
 
 I. The Doctrine of Being: 
 
 II. The Doctrine of Essence : 
 
 III. The Doctrine of Notion and Idea. 
 That is, into the Theory of Thought : 
 
 I. In its immediacy : the notion implicit and in 
 germ. 
 
 II. In its reflection and mediation : the being-for-self 
 and show of the notion. 
 
 III. In its return into itself, and its developed abid- 
 ing by itself: the notion in and for itself. 
 
 The division of Logic now given, as well as the whole of 
 the previous discussion on the nature of thought, is antici- 
 patory : and the justification, or proof of it, can only result 
 from the detailed treatment of thought itself For in philo- 
 sophy, to prove means to show how the subject by and from 
 itself makes itself what it is. The relation in which these 
 three leading grades of thought, or of the logical Idea, stand 
 to each other must be conceived as follows. Truth comes 
 only with the notion : or, more precisely, the notion is the 
 truth of being and essence, both of which, when separately 
 maintained in their isolation, cannot but be untrue, the 
 former because it is exclusively immediate, and the latter 
 because it is exclusively mediate. Why then, it may be 
 asked, begin with the false and not at once with the true ? 
 To which we answer that truth, to deserve the name, must 
 authenticate its own truth : which authentication, here within 
 the sphere of logic, is given, when the notion demonstrates 
 itself to be what is mediated by and with itself, and thus at 
 the same time to be truly immediate. This relation be- 
 tween the three stages of the logical Idea appears in a real 
 and concrete shape thus : God, who is the truth, is known 
 by us in His truth, that is, as absolute spirit, only in so far as 
 we at the same time recognise that the world which He 
 created, nature and the finite spirit, are, in their difference 
 from God, untrue. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 FIRST SUB-DIVISION OF LOGIC. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. 
 
 84.] Being is the notion implicit only : its special 
 forms have the predicate ' is ' ; when they are distin- 
 guished they are each of them an 'other': and the shape 
 which dialectic takes in them, i.e. their further speciali- 
 sation, is a passing over into another. This further 
 determination, or specialisation, is at once a forth-put- 
 ting and in that way a disengaging of the notion implicit 
 in being; and at the same time the withdrawing of 
 being inwards, its sinking deeper into itself. Thus the 
 explication of the notion in the sphere of being does 
 two things : it brings out the totality of being, and it 
 abolishes the immediacy of being, or the form of being 
 as such. 
 
 85.] Being itself and the special sub-categories of it 
 which follow, as well as those of logic in general, may 
 be looked upon as definitions of the Absolute, or meta- 
 physical definitions of God : at least the first and third 
 category in every triad may, — the first, where the 
 thought-form of the triad is formulated in its simplicity, 
 and the third, being the return from differentiation to a 
 simple self- reference. For a metaphysical definition of 
 God is the expression of His nature in thoughts as such : 
 and logic embraces all thoughts so long as they continue 
 in the thought-form. The second sub-category in each 
 
85.] THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. 1 57 
 
 triad, where the grade of thought is in its differentiation, 
 gives, on the other hand, a definition of the finite. The 
 objection to the form of definition is that it implies a 
 something in the mind's eye on which these predicates 
 may fasten. Thus even the Absolute (though it pur- 
 ports to express God in the style and character of 
 thought) in comparison with its predicate (which really 
 and distinctly expresses in thought what the subject 
 does not), is as yet only an inchoate pretended thought 
 — the indeterminate subject of predicates yet to come. 
 The thought, which is here the matter of sole import- 
 ance, is contained only in the predicate : and hence the 
 propositional form, like the said subject, viz. the Abso- 
 lute, is a mere superfluity (cf. § 31, and below, on the 
 Judgment). 
 
 Each of the three spheres of the logical idea proves to be 
 a systematic whole of thought-terms, and a phase of the 
 Absolute. This is the case with Being, containing the three 
 grades of quality, quantity, and measure. Quality is, in the 
 first place, the character identical with being : so identical, 
 that a thing ceases to be what it is, if it loses its quality. 
 Quantity, on the contrary, is the character external to being, 
 and does not affect the being at all. Thus e.g. a house re- 
 mains what it is, whether it be greater or smaller ; and red 
 remains red, whether it be brighter or darker. Measure, 
 the third grade of being, which is the unity of the first two, 
 is a qualitative quantity. All things have their measure : ;. e. 
 the quantitative terms of their existence, their being so or so 
 great, does not matter within certain limits ; but when these 
 limits are exceeded by an additional more or less, the things 
 cease to be what they were. From measure follows the 
 advance to the second sub-division of the idea. Essence. 
 
 The three forms of being here mentioned, just because 
 they are the first, are also the poorest, i.e. the most abstract. 
 Immediate (sensible) consciousness, in so far as it simul- 
 taneously includes an intellectual element, is especially re- 
 stricted to the abstract categories of quality and quantity. 
 
158 THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. [85-86. 
 
 The sensuous consciousness is in ordinary estimation the 
 most concrete and thus also the richest ; but that is only 
 true as regards materials, whereas, in reference to the thought 
 it contains, it is really the poorest and most abstract. 
 
 A. — Quality. 
 {a) Being. 
 
 86.] Pure Being makes the beginning : because it is 
 on one hand pure thought, and on the other immediacy 
 itself, simple and indeterminate ; and the first beginning 
 cannot be mediated by anything, or be further deter- 
 mined. 
 
 All doubts and admonitions, which might be brought 
 against beginning the science with abstract empty being, 
 will disappear, if we only perceive what a beginning 
 naturally implies. It is possible to define being as 
 '1 = 1,' as 'Absolute Indifference' or Identity, and so 
 on. Where it is felt necessary to begin either with 
 what is absolutely certain, i.e. the certainty of oneself, 
 or with a definition or intuition of the absolute truth, 
 these and other forms of the kind may be looked on as 
 if they must be the first. But each of these forms con- 
 tains a mediation, and hence cannot be the real first : 
 for all mediation implies advance made from a first on 
 to a second, and proceeding from something different. 
 If 1 = 1, or even the intellectual intuition, are really 
 taken to mean no more than the first, they are in this 
 mere immediacy identical with being : while conversely, 
 pure being, if abstract no longer, but including in it 
 mediation, is pure thought or intuition. 
 
 If we enunciate Being as a predicate of the Absolute, 
 we get the first definition of the latter. The Absolute 
 is Being. This is (in thought) the absolutely initial 
 definition, the most abstract and stinted. It is the defi- 
 nition given by the Eleatics, but at the same time is also 
 
86.] QUALITY — BEING. 159 
 
 the well-known definition of God as the sum of all reali- 
 ties. It means, in short, that we are to set aside that 
 limitation which is in every reality, so that God shall 
 be only the real in all reality, the superlatively real. 
 Or, if we reject reality, as implying a reflection, we get 
 a more immediate or unreflected statement of the same 
 thing, when Jacobi says that the God of Spinoza is the 
 principium of being in all existence. 
 
 (i) When thinking is to begin, we have nothing but thought 
 in its merest indeterminateness : for we cannot determine 
 unless there is both one and another ; and in the beginning 
 there is yet no other. The indeterminate, as we here have 
 it, is the blank we begin with, not a featurelessness reached 
 by abstraction, not the elimination of all character, but the 
 original featurelessness which precedes all definite character 
 andisthe very first of all. And this we call Being. It is not to 
 be feh, or perceived by sense, or pictured in imagination : it is 
 only and merely thought, and as such it forms the beginning. 
 Essence also is indeterminate, but in another sense : it has 
 traversed the process of mediation and contains implicit the 
 determination it has absorbed. 
 
 (2) In the history of philosophy the different stages of the 
 logical Idea assume the shape of successive systems, each 
 based on a particular definition of the Absolute. As the 
 logical Idea is seen to unfold itself in a process from the 
 abstract to the concrete, so in the history of philosophy the 
 earliest systems are the most abstract, and thus at the same 
 time the poorest. The relation too of the earlier to the later 
 systems of philosophy is much like the relation of the cor- 
 responding stages of the logical Idea : in other words, the 
 earlier are preserved in the later ; but subordinated and sub- 
 merged. This is the true meaning of a much misunderstood 
 phenomenon in the history of philosophy— the refutation of 
 one system by another, of an earlier by a later. Most com- 
 monly the refutation is taken in a purely negative sense to 
 mean that the system refuted has ceased to count for any- 
 thing, has been set aside and done for. Were it so, the 
 history of philosophy would be of all studies most saddening, 
 
l6o THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. [86. 
 
 displaying, as it does, the refutation of every system which 
 time has brought forth. Now, although it may be admitted 
 that every philosophy has been refuted, it must be in an 
 equal degree maintained, that no philosophy has been re- 
 futed, nay, or can be refuted. And that in two ways. For 
 first, every philosophy that deserves the name always em- 
 bodies the Idea : and secondly, every system represents one 
 particular factor or particular stage in the evolution of the 
 Idea. The refutation of a philosophy, therefore, only means 
 that its barriers are crossed, and its special principle reduced 
 to a factor in the completer principle that follows. Thus the 
 history of philosophy, in its true meaning, deals not with a 
 past, but with an eternal and veritable present : and, in its 
 results, resembles not a museum of the aberrations of the 
 human intellect, but a Pantheon of Godlike figures. These 
 figures of Gods are the various stages of the Idea, as they 
 come forward one after another in dialectical development. 
 To the historian of philosophy it belongs to point out more 
 precisely, how far the gradual evolution of his theme coin- 
 cides with, or swerves from, the dialectical unfolding of the 
 pure logical Idea. It is sufficient to mention here, that logic 
 begins where the proper history of philosophy begins. 
 Philosophy began in the Eleatic school, especially with Par- 
 menides. Parmenides, who conceives the absolute as Being, 
 says that ' Being alone is and Nothing is not.' Such was 
 the true starting-point of philosophy, which is always know- 
 ledge by thought : and here for the first time we find pure 
 thought seized and made an object to itself. 
 
 Men indeed thought from the beginning : (for thus only 
 were they distinguished from the animals). But thousands 
 of years had to elapse before they came to apprehend thought 
 in its purity, and to see in it the truly objective. The Elea- 
 tics are celebrated as daring thinkers. But this nominal 
 admiration is often accompanied by the remark that they 
 went too far, when they made Being alone true, and denied 
 the truth of every other object of consciousness. We must 
 go further than mere Being, it is true : and yet it is absurd to 
 speak of the other contents of our consciousness as some- 
 what as it were outside and beside Being, or to say that 
 
86-87.] BEING AND NOTHING. l6l 
 
 there are other things, as well as Being. The true state of 
 the case is rather as follows. Being, as Being, is nothing 
 fixed or ultimate : it yields to dialectic and sinks into its op- 
 posite, which, also taken immediately, is Nothing. After all, 
 the point is, that Being is the first pure Thought ; whatever 
 else you may begin with (the 1 = 1, the absolute indifference, or 
 God Himself), you begin with a figure of materialised concep- 
 tion, not a product of thought ; and that, so far as its thought- 
 content is concerned, such beginning is merely Bein^. 
 
 87.] But this mere Being, as it is mere abstraction, 
 is therefore the absolutely negative : which, in a simi- 
 larly immediate aspect, is just Nothing. 
 
 (i) Hence was derived the second definition of the 
 Absolute ; the Absolute is the Nought. In fact this 
 definition is implied in saying that the thing-in-itself 
 is the indeterminate, utterly without form and so 
 without content, — or in saying that God is only the 
 supreme Being and nothing more ; for this is really 
 declaring Him to be the same negativity as above. The 
 Nothing which the Buddhists make the universal prin- 
 ciple, as well as the final aim and goal of everything, is 
 the same abstraction. 
 
 (2) If the opposition in thought is stated in this im- 
 mediacy as Being and Nothing, the shock of its nullity 
 is too great not to stimulate the attempt to fix Being and 
 secure it against the transition into Nothing. With this 
 intent, reflection has recourse to the plan of discovering 
 some fixed predicate for Being, to mark it off from 
 Nothing. Thus we find Being identified with what 
 persists amid all change, with matter, susceptible of 
 innumerable determinations, — or even, unreflectingly, 
 with a single existence, any chance object of the senses 
 or of the mind. But every additional and more concrete 
 characterisation causes Being to lose that integrity and 
 simplicity it has in the beginning. Only in, and by 
 virtue of, this mere generality is it Nothing, something 
 
 VOL. II, M 
 
t62 the doctrine of being. [87. 
 
 inexpressible, whereof the distinction from Nothing is 
 a mere intention or meaning. 
 
 All that is wanted is to realise that these beginnings 
 are nothing but these empty abstractions, one as empty 
 as the other. The instinct that induces us to attach a 
 settled import to Being, or to both, is the very necessity 
 which leads to the onward movement of Being and 
 Nothing, and gives them a true or concrete significance. 
 This advance is the logical deduction and the movement 
 of thought exhibited in the sequel. The reflection which 
 finds a profounder connotation for Being and Nothing 
 is nothing but logical thought, through which such con- 
 notation is evolved, not, however, in an accidental, but a 
 necessary way. Every signification, therefore, in which 
 they afterwards appear, is only a more precise specifica- 
 tion and truer definition of the Absolute. And when 
 that is done, the mere abstract Being and Nothing are 
 replaced by a concrete in which both these elements 
 form an organic part. — The supreme form of Nought as 
 a separate principle would be Freedom : but Freedom 
 is negativity in that stage, when it sinks self-absorbed 
 to supreme intensity, and is itself an affirmation, and 
 even absolute affirmation. 
 
 The distinction between Being and Nought is, in the first 
 place, only implicit, and not yet actually made : they only 
 ought to be distinguished. A distinction of course implies 
 two things, and that one of them possesses an attribute 
 which is not found in the other. Being however is an abso- 
 lute absence of attributes, and so is Nought. Hence the 
 distinction between the two is only meant to be ; it is a quite 
 nominal distinction, which is at the same time no distinction. 
 In all other cases of difference there is some common point 
 which comprehends both things. Suppose e.g. we speak of 
 two different species : the genus forms a common ground 
 for both. But in the case of mere Being and Nothing, dis- 
 tinction is without a bottom to stand upon : hence there can be 
 
87-88.] BEING AND NOTHING. 163 
 
 no distinction, both determinations being the same bottom- 
 lessness. If it be replied that Being and Nothing are both 
 of them thoughts, so that thought may be reckoned common 
 ground, the objector forgets that Being is not a particular 
 or definite thought, and hence, being quite indeterminate, is 
 a thought not to be distinguished from Nothing.— It is natural 
 too for us to represent Being as absolute riches, and No- 
 thing as absolute poverty. But if when we view the whole 
 world we can only say that everything is, and nothing 
 more, we are neglecting all speciality and, instead of abso- 
 lute plenitude, we have absolute emptiness. The same stric- 
 ture is applicable to those who define G<'d to be mere 
 Being ; a definition rot a whit better than that of the Bud- 
 dhists, who make God to be Nought, and who from that 
 principle draw the further conclusion that self-annihilation is 
 the means by which man becomes God. 
 
 88.] Nothing, if it be thus immediate and equal to 
 itself, is also conversely the same as Being is. The 
 truth of Being and of Nothing is accordingly the unity 
 of the two : and this unity is Becoming. 
 
 (i) The proposition that Being and Nothing is the 
 same seems so paradoxical to the imagination or under- 
 standing, that it is perhaps taken for a joke. And in- 
 deed it is one of the hardest things thought expects 
 itself to do : for Being and Nothing exhibit the funda- 
 mental contrast in all its immediacy, — that is, without the 
 one term being invested with any attribute which would 
 involve its connexion with the other. This attribute 
 however, as the above paragraph points out, is implicit 
 in them — the attribute which is just the same in both. 
 So far the deduction of their unity is completely analy- 
 tical : indeed the whole progress of philosophising in 
 every case, if it be a methodical, that is to say a neces- 
 sary, progress, merely renders explicit what is implicit 
 in a notion. — It is as correct however to say that Being 
 and Nothing are altogether different, as to assert their 
 
 M 2 
 
164 THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. [88. 
 
 unity. The one is not what the other is. But since the 
 distinction has not at this point assumed definite shape 
 (Being and Nothing are still the immediate), it is, in the 
 way that the}' have it, something unutterable, which we 
 merely mean. 
 
 (2) No great expenditure of wit is needed to make 
 fun of the maxim that Being and Nothing are the same, 
 or rather to adduce absurdities which, it is erroneously 
 asserted, are the consequences and illustrations of that 
 maxim. 
 
 If Being and Nought are identical, say these objec- 
 tors, it follows that it makes no difference whether my 
 home, my property, the air I breathe, this city, the sun, 
 the law, mind, God, are or are not. Now in some of 
 these cases, the objectors foist in private aims, the utility 
 a thing has for me, and then ask, whether it be al' the 
 same to me if the thing exist and if it do not. For that 
 matter indeed, the teaching of philosophy is precisely 
 what frees man from the endless crowd of finite aims 
 and intentions, by making him so insensible to them, 
 that their existence or non-existence is to him a matter 
 of indifference. But it is never to be forgotten that, 
 once mention something substantial, and you thereby 
 create a connexion with other existences and other pur- 
 poses which are ex hypothesi worth having : and on such 
 hypothesis it comes to depend whether the Being and 
 not- Being of a determinate subject are the same or not. 
 A substantial distinction is in these cases secretly sub- 
 stituted for the empty distinction of Being and Nought. 
 In others of the cases referred to, it is virtually absolute 
 existences and vital ideas and aims, which are placed 
 under the mere category of Being or not- Being. But 
 there is more to be said of these concrete objects, than 
 that they merely are or are not. Barren abstractions, 
 like Being and Nothing— the initial categories which. 
 
88.] BECOMING. 165 
 
 for that reason, are the scantiest anywhere to be found 
 —are utterly inadequate to the nature of these objects. 
 Substantial truth is something far above these abstrac- 
 tions and their oppositions. — And always when a con- 
 crete existence is disguised under the name of Being 
 and not-Being, empty-headedness makes its usual mis- 
 take of speaking about, and having in the mind an image 
 of, something else than what is in question : and in this 
 place the question is about abstract Being and Nothing. 
 (3) It may perhaps be said that nobody can form 
 a notion of the unity of Being and Nought. As for that, 
 the notion of the unity is stated in the sections preced- 
 ing, and that is all : apprehend that, and you have 
 comprehended this unity. What the objector really 
 means by comprehension— by a notion — is more than 
 his language properly implies : he wants a richer and 
 more complex state of mind, a pictorial conception which 
 will propound the notion as a concrete case and one 
 more familiar to the ordinary operations of thought. 
 And so long as incomprehensibility means only the want 
 of habituation for the effort needed to grasp an abstract 
 thought, free from all sensuous admixture, and to seize 
 a speculative truth, the reply to the criticism is, that 
 philosophical knowledge is undoubtedly distinct in kind 
 from the mode of knowledge best known in common 
 life, as well as from that which reigns in the other 
 sciences. But if to have no notion merely means that 
 we cannot represent in imagination the oneness of Being 
 and Nought, the statement is far from being true; for 
 every one has countless ways of envisaging this unity. 
 To say that we have no such conception can only mean, 
 that in none of these images do we recognise the notion 
 in question, and that we are not aware that they exem- 
 plify it. The readiest example of it is Becoming. 
 Every one has a mental idea of Becoming, and will 
 
l66 THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. [88. 
 
 even allow that it, is one idea : he will further allow that, 
 when it is analysed, it involves the attribute of Being, 
 and also what is the very reverse of Being, viz. Nothing : 
 and that these two attributes lie undivided in the one 
 idea : so that Becoming is the unity of Being and 
 Nothing. — Another tolerably plain example is a Be- 
 ginning. In its beginning, the thing is not yet, but it is 
 more than merely nothing, for its Being is already in 
 the beginning. Beginning is itself a case of Becoming ; 
 only the former term is employed with an eye to the 
 further advance. — If we were to adapt logic to the more 
 usual method of the sciences, we might start with the 
 representation of a Beginning as abstractly thought, or 
 with Beginning as such, and then analyse this repre- 
 sentation ; and perhaps people would more readily 
 admit, as a result of this analysis, that Being and 
 Nothing present themselves as undivided in unity. 
 
 (4) It remains to note that such phrases as ' Being 
 and Nothing are the same,' or ' The unity of Being and 
 Nothing' — like all other such unities, that of subject 
 and object, and others — give rise to reasonable objec- 
 tion. They misrepresent the facts, by giving an exclu- 
 sive prominence to the unity, and leaving the difference 
 which undoubtedly exists in it (because it is Being and 
 Nothing, for example, the unity of which is declared) 
 without any express mention or notice. It accordingly 
 seems as if the diversity had been unduly put out of 
 court and neglected. The fact is, no speculative prin- 
 ciple can be correctly expressed by any such proposi- 
 tional form, for the unity has to be conceived in the 
 diversity, which is all the while present and explicit. 
 ' To become ' is the true expression for the resultant of 
 ' To be ' and ' Not to be ' ; it is the unity of the two ; but 
 not only is it the unity, it is also inherent unrest, — the 
 unity, which is no mere reference-tojself and therefore 
 
88.] BECOMING. 167 
 
 without movement, but which, through the diversity of 
 Being and Nothing that is in it, is at war within itself. 
 — Determinate being, on the other hand, is this unity, 
 or Becoming in this form of unity: hence all that 'is 
 there and so,' is one-sided and finite. The opposition 
 between the two factors seems to have vanished ; it is 
 only implied in the unity, it is not explicitly put in it. 
 
 (5) The maxim of Becoming, that Being is the pas- 
 sage into Nought, and Nought the passage into Being, is 
 controverted by the maxim of Pantheism, the doctrine 
 of the eternity of matter, that from nothing comes 
 nothing, and that something can only come out of some- 
 thing. The ancients saw plainly that the maxim, ' From 
 nothing comes nothing, from something something,' 
 really abolishes Becoming : for what it comes from and 
 what it becomes are one and the same. Thus explained, 
 the proposition is the maxim of abstract identity as up- 
 held by the understanding. It cannot but seem strange, 
 therefore, to hear such maxims as, 'Out of nothing 
 comes nothing : Out of something comes something,' 
 calmly taught in these days, without the teacher being 
 in the least aware that they are the basis of Pantheism, 
 and even without his knowing that the ancients have 
 exhausted all that is to be said about them. 
 
 Becoming is the first concrete thought, and therefore the 
 first notion : whereas Being and Nought are empty abstrac- 
 tions. The notion of Being, therefore, of which we some- 
 times speak, must mean Becoming ; not the mere point 
 of Being, which is empty Nothing, any more t-han Nothing, 
 which is empty Being. In Being then we have Nothing, 
 and in Nothing Being : but this Being which does not lose 
 itself in Nothing is Becoming. Nor must we omit the dis- 
 tinction, while we emphasise the unity of Becoming : with- 
 out that distinction we should once more return to abstract 
 Being. Becoming is only the explicit statement of what 
 Being is in its truth. 
 
l68 THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. [88. 
 
 We often hear it maintained that thought is opposed to 
 being. Now in the face of such a statement, our first ques- 
 tion ought to be, what is meant by being. If we under- 
 stand being as it is defined by reflection, all that we can say 
 of it is that it is what is wholly identical and affirmative. And 
 if we then look at thought, it cannot escape us that thought 
 also is at least what is absolutely identical with itself. Both 
 therefore, being as well as thought, have the same attribute. 
 This identity of being and thought is not however to be 
 taken in a concrete sense, as if we could say that a stone, so 
 far as it has being, is the same as a thinking man. A concrete 
 thing is always very different from the abstract category as 
 such. And in the case of being, we are speaking of nothing 
 concrete : for being is the utterly abstract. So far then the 
 question regarding the being of God— a being which is in 
 itself concrete above all measure— is of slight importance. 
 
 As the first concrete thought-term. Becoming is the first 
 adequate vehicle of truth. In the history of philosophy, this 
 stage of the logical Idea finds its analogue in the system of 
 Heraclitus. When Heraclitus says ' All is flowing ' {navra pel), 
 he enunciates Becoming as the fundamental feature of all 
 existence, whereas the Eleatics, as already remarked, saw 
 the only truth in Being, rigid processless Being. Glancing 
 at the principle of the Eleatics, Heraclitus then goes on 
 to say : Being no more is than not-Being {olbev fiaWov to t>v 
 Tou fiq ovTos fVri) : a statement expressing the negativity of 
 abstract Being, and its identity with not-Being, as made ex- 
 plicit in Becoming : both abstractions being alike untenable. 
 This maybe looked at as an instance of the real refutation of 
 one system by another. To refute a philosophy is to exhibit 
 the dialectical movement in its principle, and thus reduce it 
 to a constituent member of a higher concrete form of the 
 Idea. Even Becoming however, taken at its best on its own 
 ground, is an extremely poor term : it needs to grow in 
 depth and weight of meaning. Such deepened force we 
 find e.g. in Life. Life is a Becoming ; but that is not enough 
 to exhaust the notion of life. A still higher form is found in 
 Mind. Here too is Becoming, but richer and more inten- 
 sive than mere logical Becoming. The elements, whose 
 
88- 89- J DETERMINATE BEING. 1 69 
 
 unity constitutes mind, are not the bare abstracts of Being and 
 of Nought, but the system of the logical Idea and of Nature. 
 
 {b) Being Determinate. 
 
 89.] In Becoming the Being which is one with 
 Nothing, and the Nothing which is one with Being, are 
 only vanishing factors ; they are and they are not. 
 Thus by its inherent contradiction Becoming collapses 
 into the unity in which the two elements are absorbed. 
 This result is accordingly Being Determinate (Being 
 there and so). 
 
 In this first example we must call to mind, once for 
 all, what was stated in § 82 and in the note there : the 
 only way to secure any growth and progress in know- 
 ledge is to hold results fast in their truth. There is 
 absolutely nothing whatever in which we cannot and 
 must not point to contradictions or opposite attributes ; 
 and the abstraction made by understanding therefore 
 means a forcible insistance on a single aspect, and a real 
 effort to obscure and remove all consciousness of the 
 other attribute which is involved. Whenever such con- 
 tradiction, then, is discovered in any object or notion, 
 the usual inference is, Hence this object is nothing. 
 Thus Zeno, who first showed the contradiction native 
 to motion, concluded that there is no motion : and the 
 ancients, who recognised origin and decease, the two 
 species of Becoming, as untrue categories, made use 
 of the expression that the One or Absolute neither 
 arises nor perishes. Such a style of dialectic looks only 
 at the negative aspect of its result, and fails to notice, 
 what is at the same time really present, the definite 
 result, in the present case a pure nothing, but a Nothing 
 which includes Being, and, in like manner, a Being 
 which includes Nothing. Hence Being Determinate is 
 (1) the unity of Being and Nothing, in which we get rid 
 
170 THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. [89 90. 
 
 of the immediacy in these determinations, and their 
 contradiction vanishes in their mutual connexion, — the 
 unity in which they are only constituent elements. And 
 {2) since the result is the abolition of the contradiction, 
 it comes in the shape of a simple unity with itself: that 
 is to say, it also is Being, but Being with negation or 
 determinateness : it is Becoming expressly put in the 
 form of one of its elements, viz. Being. 
 
 Even our ordinary conception of Becoming implies that 
 somewhat comes out of it, and that Becoming therefore has 
 a result. But this conception gives rise to the question, how 
 Becoming does not remain mere Becoming, but has a re- 
 sult.? The answer to this question follows from what Be- 
 coming has already shown itself to be. Becoming always 
 contains Being and Nothing in such a way, that these two 
 are always changing into each other, and reciprocally can- 
 celling each other. Thus Becoming stands before us in 
 utter restlessness — unable however to maintain itself in 
 this abstract restlessness : for since Being and Nothing 
 vanish in Becoming (and that is the very notion of Becom- 
 ing), the latter must vanish also. Becoming is as it were a 
 fire, which dies out in itself, when it consumes its m_aterial. 
 The result of this process however is not an empty Nothing, 
 but Being identical with the negation,— what we call Being 
 Determinate (being then and there) : the primary import of 
 which evidently is that it has become. 
 
 90.J (a) Determinate Being is Being with a character 
 or mode — which simply is ; and such un-mediated 
 character is Quality. And as reflected into itself in 
 this its character or mode. Determinate Being is a some- 
 what, an existent. — The categories, which issue by 
 a closer analysis of Determinate Being, need only be 
 mentioned briefly. 
 
 Quality may be described as the determinate mode imme- 
 diate and identical with Being — as distinguished from Quan- 
 tity (to come afterwards), which, although a mode of Being, 
 
90-9I.] QUALITY. 17I 
 
 is no longer immediately identical with Being, but a mode 
 indifferent and external to it. A Something is what it is in 
 virtue of its quality, and losing its quality it ceases to be what 
 it is. Quality, moreover, is completely a category only of 
 the finite, and for that reason too it has its proper place in 
 Nature, not in the world of Mind. Thus, for example, in 
 Nature what are styled the elementary bodies, oxygen, 
 nitrogen, &;c., should be regarded as existing qualities. But 
 in the sphere of mind, Quality appears in a subordinate way 
 only, and not as if its qualitativeness could exhaust any 
 specific aspect of m'nd. If, for example, we consider the 
 subjective mind, which forms the object of psychology, we 
 may describe what is called (moral and mental) character, as 
 in logical language identical with Quality. This however 
 does not mean that character is a mode of being which per- 
 vades the soul and is immediately identical with it, as is the 
 case in the natural world with the elementary bodies before 
 mentioned. Yet a more distinct manifestation of Quality as 
 such, in mind even, 11 found in the case of besotted or morbid 
 conditions, especially in states of passion and when the pas- 
 sion rises to derangement. The state of mind of a deranged 
 person, being one mass of jealousy, fear, &c., may suitably 
 be described as Quality. 
 
 91.] Quality, as determinateness which is, as con- 
 trasted with the Negation which is involved in it but 
 distinguished from it, is Reality. Negation is no longer 
 an abstract nothing, but, as a determinate being and 
 somewhat, is only a form on such being — it is as Other- 
 ness. Since this otherness, though a determination 
 of Quality itself, is in the first instance distinct from it, 
 Quality is Being-for-another — an expansion of the mere 
 point of Determinate Being, or of Somewhat. The 
 Being as such of Quality, contrasted with this reference 
 lo somewhat else, is Being-by-self. 
 
 The foundation of all determinateness is negation (as 
 Spinoza says, Omnis determinaiio est negatio). The unre- 
 flecting observer supposes that determinate things are merely 
 
172 THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. [91-92. 
 
 positive, and pins them down under the form of being. 
 Mere being however is not the end of the matter : — it is, as 
 we have already seen, utter emptiness and instability besides. 
 Still, when abstract being is confused in this way with being 
 modified and determinate, it implies some perception of the 
 fact that, though in determinate being there is involved an 
 element of negation, this element is at first wrapped up, as it 
 were, and only comes to the front and receives its due in 
 Being-for-self.— If we go on to consider determinate Being 
 as a determinateness which is, we get in this way what is 
 called Reality. We speak, for example, of the reality of a 
 plan or a purpose, meaning thereby that they are no longer 
 inner and subjective, but have passed into being-there-and- 
 then. In the same sense the body may be called the reality 
 of the soul, and the law the reality of freedom, and the world 
 altogether the reality of the divine idea. The word ' reality ' 
 is however used in another acceptation to mean that some- 
 thing behaves conformably to its essential characteristic or 
 notion. For example, we use the expression : This is a real 
 occupation : This is a real man. Here the term does not 
 merely mean outward and immediate existence : but rather 
 that some existence agrees with its notion. In which sense, 
 be it added, reality is not distinct from the ideality which 
 we shall in the first instance become acquainted with in the 
 shape of Being-for-self. 
 
 92.] (3) Being, if kept distinct and apart from its deter- 
 mintite mode, as it is in Being-by-self (Being implicit), 
 would be only the vacant abstraction of Being. In Being 
 (determinate there and then), the determinateness is 
 one with Being ; yet at the same time, when explicitly 
 made a negation, it is a Limit, a Barrier. Hence the 
 otherness is not something indifferent and outside it, 
 but a function proper to it. Somewhat is by its quality, 
 — firstly finite,— secondly alterable; so that finitude 
 and variability appertain to its being. 
 
 In Being-there-and-then, the negation is still directly one 
 with the Being, and this negation is what we call a Limit 
 
92. J REALITY AND LIMIT. 1 73 
 
 (Boundary). A thing is what it is, only in and by reason of 
 its limit. We cannot therefore regard the limit as only ex- 
 ternal to being which is then and there. It rather goes 
 through and through the whole of such existence. The 
 view of limit, as merely an external characteristic of being- 
 there-and-then, arises from a confusion of quantitative with 
 qualitative limit. Here we are speaking primarily of the 
 qualitative limit. If, for example, we observe a piece of 
 ground, three acres large, that circumstance is its quantita- 
 tive limit. But, in addition, the ground is, it may be, a 
 meadow, not a wood or a pond. This is its qualitative limit. 
 — Man, if he wishes to be actual, must be-there- and-then, and 
 to this end he must set a limit to himself. People who 
 are too fastidious towards the finite never reach actuality, 
 but linger lost in abstraction, and their light dies away. 
 
 If we take a closer look at what a limit implies, we see it 
 involving a contradiction in itself, and thus evincing its dia- 
 lectical nature. On the one side the limit makes the reality 
 of a thing ; on the other it is its negation. But, again, the 
 limit, as the negation of something, is not an abstract no- 
 thing but a nothingwhich/s,— what wecallan 'other.' Given 
 something, and up starts an other to us : we know that there 
 is not something only, but an other as well. Nor, again, is 
 the other of such a nature that we can think something apart 
 from it ; a something is implicitlj' the other of itself, and the 
 somewhat sees its limit become objective to it in the other. 
 If we now ask for the difference between something and an- 
 other, it turns out that they are the same : which sameness is 
 expressed in Latin by calling the pair aliud—aliud. The other, 
 as opposed to the something, is itself a something, and hence 
 we say some other, or something else ; and so on the other 
 hand the first something when opposed to the other, also 
 defined as something, is itself an other. When we say 
 'something else' our first impression is. that something 
 taken separately is only something, and that the quality of 
 being another attaches to it only from outside considerations. 
 Thus we suppose that the moon, being something else than 
 the sun, might very well exist without the sun. But really 
 the moon, as a something, has its other implicit in it : Plato 
 
174 THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. [92-94- 
 
 says: God made the world out of the nature of the 'one' 
 and the 'other' {tov erfpov): having brought these together, 
 he formed from them a third, which is of the nature of the 
 'one' and the 'other.' In these words we have in general 
 terms a statement of the nature of the finite, which, as some- 
 thing, does not meet the nature of the other as if it had no 
 affinity to it, but, being implicitly the other of itself, thus 
 undergoes alteration. Alteration thus exhibits the inherent 
 contradiction which originally attaches to determinate being, 
 and which forces it out of its own bounds. To materialised 
 conception existence stands in the character of something 
 solely positive, and quietly abiding within its own limits : 
 though we also know, it is true, that everything finite (such as 
 existence) is subject to change. Such changeableness in 
 existence is to the superficial eye a mere possibility, the 
 realisation of which is not a consequence of its own nature. 
 But the fact is, mutability lies in the notion of existence, and 
 change is only the manifestation of what it irr.plicitly is. 
 The living die, simply because as living they bear in them- 
 selves the germ of death. 
 
 93.] Something becomes an other : this other is itself 
 somewhat : therefore it likewise becomes an other, and 
 so on ad infinitum. 
 
 94.] This Infinity is the wrong or negative infinity : 
 it is only a negation of a finite : but the finite rises again 
 the same as ever, and is never got rid of and absorbed. 
 In other words, this infinite only expresses the ought-to- 
 be elimination of the finite. The progression to infinity 
 never gets further than a statement of the contradiction 
 involved in the finite, viz. that it is somewhat as well as 
 somewhat else. It sets up with endless iteration the 
 alternation between these two terms, each of which calls 
 up the other. 
 
 If we let somewhat and another, the elements of determi- 
 nate Being, fall asunder, the result is that some becomes 
 other, and this other is itself a somewhat, which then as 
 such changes likewise, and so on ad infinitum. This result 
 
94.] THE INFINITE PROGRESSION. 175 
 
 seems to superficial reflection something very grand, the 
 grandest possible. But such a progression to infinity is not 
 the real infinite. That consists in being at home with itself 
 in its other, or, if enunciated as a process, in coming to itself 
 in its other. Much depends on rightly apprehending the 
 notion of infinity, and not stopping short at the wrong in- 
 finity of endless progression. When time and space, for 
 example, are spoken of as infinite, it is in the first place the 
 infinite progression on which our thoughts fasten. We say, 
 Now, This time, and then we keep continually going for- 
 wards and backwards beyond this limit. The case is the 
 same with space, the infinity of which has formed the 
 theme of barren declamation to astronomers with a talent 
 for edification. In the attempt to contemplate such an in- 
 finite, our thought, we are commonly informed, must sink 
 exhausted. It is true indeed that we must abandon the 
 unending contemplation, not however because the occu- 
 pation is too sublime, but because it is too tedious. It is 
 tedious to expatiate in the contemplation of this infinite pro- 
 gression, because the same thing is constantly recurring. 
 We lay down a limit : then we pass it : next we have a 
 limit once m.ore, and so on for ever. All this is but super- 
 ficial alternation, which never leaves the region of the finite 
 behind. To suppose that by stepping out and away into that 
 infinity we release ourselves from the finite, is in truth but 
 to seek the release which comes by flight. But the man 
 who flees is not yet free : in fleeing he is still conditioned by 
 that from which he flees. If it be also said, that the infinite 
 is unattainable, the statement is true, but only because to 
 the idea of infinity has been attached the circumstance of 
 being simply and solely negative. With such empty and 
 other-world stuff" philosophy has nothing to do. What 
 philosophy has to do with is always something concrete 
 and in the highest sense present. 
 
 No doubt philosophy has also sometimes been set the task 
 of finding an answer to the question, how the infinite comes 
 to the resolution of issuing out of itself. This question, 
 founded, as it is, upon the assumption of a rigid opposition 
 between finite and infinite, may be answered by saying that 
 
176 THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. [94-95 
 
 the opposition is false, and that in point of fact the infinite 
 eternally proceeds out of itself, and yet does not proceed 
 out of itself. If we further say that the infinite is the not- 
 finite, we have in point of fact virtually expressed the truth : 
 for as the finite itself is the first negative, the not-finite is 
 the negative of that negation, the negation which is identical 
 with itself and thus at the same time a true affirmation. 
 
 The infinity of reflection here discussed is only an attempt 
 to reach the true Infinity, a wretched neither-one-thing-nor- 
 another. Generally speaking, it is the point of view which 
 has in recent times been emphasised in Germany. The 
 finite, this theory tells us, ought to be absorbed ; the infinite 
 ought not to be a negative merely, but also a positive. That 
 ' ought to be ' betrays the incapacity of actually making good 
 a claim which is at the same time recognised to be right. 
 This stage was never passed by the systems of Kant and 
 Fichte, so far as ethics are concerned. The utmost to which 
 this way brings us is only the postulate of a never-ending 
 approximation to the law of Reason : which postulate has 
 been made an argument for the immortality of the soul. 
 
 96.] (7) What we now in point of fact have before us, 
 is that somewhat comes to be an other, and that the 
 other generally comes to be an other. Thus essentially 
 relative to another, somewhat is virtually an other 
 against it : and since what is passed into is quite the 
 same as what passes over, since both have one and the 
 same attribute, viz. to be an other, it follows that some- 
 thing in its passage into other only joins with itself. 
 To be thus self-related in the passage, and in the 
 other, is the genuine Infinity. Or, under a negative 
 aspect: vi^hat is altered is the other, it becomes the 
 other of the other. Thus Being, but as negation of the 
 negation, is restored again : it is now Being-for-self. 
 
 Dualism, in putting an insuperable opposition be- 
 tween finite and infinite, fails to note the simple circum- 
 stance that the infinite is thereby only one of two, and 
 is reduced to a particular, to which the finite forms the 
 
95] FINITE AND INFINITE. 177 
 
 Other particular. Such an infinite, which is only a par- 
 ticular, is co-terminous with the finite which makes for 
 it a limit and a barrier : it is not what it ought to be, 
 that is, the infinite, but is only finite. In such circum- 
 stances, where the finite is on this side, and the infinite 
 on that, — this world as the finite and the other world as 
 the infinite, — an equal dignity of permanence and inde- 
 pendence is ascribed to finite and to infinite. The 
 being of the finite is made an absolute being, and by this 
 dualism gets independence and stability. Touched, so 
 to speak, by the infinite, it would be annihilated. But 
 it must not be touched by the infinite. There must be 
 an abyss, an impassable gulf between the two, with the 
 infinite abiding on yonder side and the finite steadfast 
 on this. Those who attribute to the finite this inflexible 
 persistence in comparison with the infinite are not, as 
 they imagine, far above metaphysic : they are still on the 
 level of the most ordinary metaphysic of understanding. 
 For the same thing occurs here as in the infinite pro- 
 gression. At one time it is admitted that the finite has 
 no independent actuality, no absolute being, no root 
 and development of its own, but is only a transient. 
 But next moment this is straightway forgotten ; the 
 finite, made a mere counterpart to the infinite, wholly 
 separated from it, and rescued from annihilation, is con- 
 ceived to be persistent in its independence. While 
 thought thus imagines itself elevated to the infinite, it 
 meets with the opposite fate : it comes to an infinite which 
 is only a finite, and the finite, which it had left behind, 
 has always to be retained and made into an absolute. 
 
 After this examination (with which it were well to 
 compare Plato's Philebus), tending to show the nullity 
 of the distinction made by understanding between the 
 finite and the infinite, we are liable to glide into the 
 statement that the infinite and the finite are therefore 
 
 VOL. II. N 
 
178 THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. [95. 
 
 one, and that the genuine infinity, the truth, must be 
 defined and enunciated as the unity of the finite and 
 infinite. Such a statement would be to some extent 
 correct ; but is just as open to perversion and falsehood 
 as the unity of Being and Nothing already noticed. 
 Besides it may very fairly be charged with reducing the 
 infinite to finitude and making a finite infinite. For, so 
 far as the expression goes, the finite seems left in its 
 place, — it is not expressly stated to be absorbed. Or, 
 if we reflect that the finite, when identified with the 
 infinite, certainly cannot remain what it was out of such 
 unity, and will at least suffer some change in its charac- 
 teristics ( — as an alkali, when combined with an acid, 
 loses some of its properties), we must see that, the same 
 fate awaits the infinite, which, as the negative, will on 
 its part likewise have its edge, as it were, taken off" on 
 the other. And this does really happen with the ab- 
 stract one-sided infinite of understanding. The genuine 
 infinite however is not merely in the position of the one- 
 sided acid, and so does not lose itself. The negation 
 of negation is not a neutralisation : the infinite is the 
 affirmative, and it is only the finite which is absorbed. 
 
 In Being-for-self enters the category of Ideality. 
 Being-there-and-then, as in the first instance appre- 
 hended in its being or affirmation, has reality (§ 91) : 
 and thus even finitude in the first instance is in the 
 category of reality. But the truth of the finite is rather 
 its ideality. Similarly, the infinite of understanding, 
 which is co-ordinated with the finite, is itself only one 
 of two finites, no whole truth, but a non-substantial 
 element. This ideality of the finite is the chief maxim 
 of philosophy ; and for that reason every genuine philo- 
 sophy is idealism. But everything depends upon not 
 taking for the infinite what, in the very terms of its 
 characterisation, is. at the same time made a particular 
 
95-96] REALITY AND IDEALITY. I79 
 
 and finite. — For this reason we have bestowed a greater 
 amount of attention on this distinction. The funda- 
 mental notion of philosophy, the genuine infinite, de- 
 pends upon it. The distinction is cleared up by the 
 simple, and for that reason seemingly insignificant, but 
 incontrovertible reflections, contained in the first para- 
 graph of this section. 
 
 {c) Being-for-self. 
 96.] (fl) Being-for self, as reference to itself, is imme- 
 diacy, and as reference of the negative to itself, is a 
 self-subsistent, the One. This unit, being without dis- 
 tinction in itself, thus excludes the other from itself. 
 
 To be for self— to be one — is completed Quality, and as 
 such, contains abstract Being and Being modified as non- 
 substantial elements. As simple Being, the One is simple 
 self-reference ; as Being modified it is determinate : but 
 the determinateness is not in this case a finite determinate- 
 ness— a somewhat in distinction from an other— but infinite, 
 because it contains distinction absorbed and annulled in 
 itself. 
 
 The readiest instance of Being-for-self is found in the ' I.' 
 We know ourselves as existents, distinguished in the first 
 place from other existents, and with certain relations thereto. 
 But we also come to know this expansion of existence (in 
 these relations) reduced, as it were, to a point in the 
 simple form of being-for-self. When we say ' I,' we express 
 the reference-to-self which is infinite, and at the same time 
 negative. Man, it may be said, is distinguished from the 
 animal world, and in that way from nature altogether, by 
 knowing himself as ' I ' : which amounts to saying that 
 natural things never attain a free Being-for-self, but as 
 limited to Being-there-and-then, are always and only Being 
 for an other. — Again, Being-for-self may be described as 
 ideality, just as Being-there-and-then was described as 
 reality. It is said, that besides reality there is also an 
 ideality. Thus the two categories are made equal and 
 parallel. Properly speaking, ideality is not somewhat out- 
 
 N 2 
 
l8o THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. [96-97. 
 
 side of and beside reality : the notion of ideality just lies in 
 its being the truth of reality. That is to say, when reality is 
 explicitly put as what it impHcitly is, it is at once seen to be 
 ideality. Hence ideality has not received its proper estima- 
 tion, when you allow that reality is not all in all, but that an 
 ideality must be recognised outside of it. Such an ideality, 
 external to or it may be even beyond reality, would be no 
 better than an empty name. Ideality only has a meaning 
 when it is the ideality of something : but this something is 
 not a mere indefinite this or that, but existence characterised 
 as reality, which, if retained in isolation, possesses no truth. 
 The distinction between Nature and Mind is not improperly 
 conceived, when the former is traced back to reality, and the 
 latter to ideality as a fundamental category. Nature however 
 is far from being so fixed and complete, as to subsist even 
 without Mind : in Mind it first, as it were, attains its goal 
 and its truth. And similarly, Mind on its part is not merely 
 a world beyond Nature and nothing more : it is really, and 
 with full proof, seen to be mind, only when it involves Nature 
 as absorbed in itself. — Apropos of this, we should note the 
 double meaning of the German word aufhcben (to put by, or 
 set aside). We mean by it (i) to clear away, or annul : 
 thus, we say, a law or a regulation is set aside : (2) to 
 keep, or preserve : in which sense we use it when we 
 say: something is well put by. This double usage of 
 language, which gives to the same word a positive and nega- 
 tive meaning, is not an accident, and gives no ground for 
 reproaching language as a cause of confusion. We should 
 rather recognise in it the speculative spirit of our language 
 rising above the mere ' Either— or ' of understanding. 
 
 07.] (/S) The relation of the negative to itself is a 
 negative relation, and so a distinguishing of the One 
 from itself, the repulsion of the One ; that is, it makes 
 Many Ones, So far as regards the immediacy of the 
 self-existents, these Many are : and the repulsion of 
 every One of them becomes to that extent their repul- 
 sion against each other as existing units,— in other 
 words, their reciprocal exclusion. 
 
97-98.] THE ONE AND THE MANY. l8l 
 
 Whenever we speak of the One, the Many usually come 
 into our mind at the same time. Whence, then, we are 
 forced to ask, do the Many comr- ? This question is un- 
 answerable by the consciousness which pictures the Many as 
 a primary datum, and treats the One as only one among the 
 Many. But the philosophic notion teaches, contrariwise, that 
 the One forms the pre-supposition of the Many ; and in the 
 thought of the One is implied that it explicitly make itself 
 Many. The self-existing unit is not, like Being, void of all 
 connective reference : it is a reference, as well as Being- 
 there-and-then was, not however a reference connecting 
 somewhat with an other, but, as unity of the some and the 
 other, it is a connexion with itself, and this connexion be it 
 noted is a negative connexion. Hereby the One manifests 
 an utter incompatibility with itself, a self-repulsion : and 
 what it makes itself explicitly be, is the Many. We may 
 denote this side in the process of Being-for-self by the 
 figurative term Repulsion. Repulsion ^s a term originally 
 employed in the study of matter, to mean that matter, as a 
 Many, m each of these many Ones, behaves as exclusive to 
 all the others. It would be wrong however to view the pro- 
 cess of repulsion, as if the One were the repellent and the 
 Many the repelled. The One, as already remarked, just is 
 self-exclusion and explicit putting itself as the Many. Each 
 of the Many however is itself a One, and in virtue of its so 
 behaving, this all-round repulsion is by one stroke converted 
 into its opposite, — Attraction. 
 
 98.] (y) But the Many are one the same as another: 
 each is One, or even one of the Many ; they are con- 
 sequently one and the same. Or when we study all 
 that Kepulsion involves, we see that as a negative 
 attitude of many Ones to one another, it is just as 
 essentially a connective reference of them to each other; 
 and as those to which the One is related in its act of 
 repulsion are ones, it is in them thrown into relation 
 with itself. The repulsion therefore has an equal right 
 to be called Attraction ; and the exclusive One, or 
 Being-for-self, suppresses itself. The qualitative cha- 
 
l82 THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. [98. 
 
 racter, which in the One or unit has reached the ex- 
 treme point of its characterisation, has thus passed 
 over into determinateness (quality) suppressed, /'. e. into 
 Being as Quantity. 
 
 The philosophy of the Atomists is the 'doctrine in 
 which the Absolute is formulated as Being-for-self, as 
 One, and many ones. And it is the repulsion, which 
 shows itself in the notion of the One, which is assumed 
 as the fundamental force in these atoms. But instead 
 of attraction, it is Accident, that is, mere unintelligence, 
 which is expected to bring them together. So long as 
 the One is fixed as one, it is certainly impossible to 
 regard its congression with others as anything but 
 external and mechanical. The Void, which is assumed 
 as the complementary principle to the atoms, is repul- 
 sion and nothing else, presented under the image of 
 the nothing existing between the atoms. — Modern 
 Atomism— and physics is still in principle atomistic — 
 has surrendered the atoms so far as to pin its faith 
 on molecules or particles. In so doing, science has 
 come closer to sensuous conception, at the cost of 
 losing the precision of thought. — To put an attractive 
 by the side of a repulsive force, as the moderns have 
 done, certainly gives completeness to the contrast : and 
 the discovery of this natural force, as it is called, has 
 been a source of much pride. But the mutual impli- 
 cation of the two, which makes what is true and con- 
 crete in them, would have to be wrested from the 
 obscurity and confusion in which they were left even 
 in Kant's Metaphysical Rudiments of Natural Science. 
 — In modern times the importance of the atomic theory 
 is even more evident in political than in physical science. 
 According to it, the will of individuals as such is the 
 creative principle of the State : the attracting force is 
 the special wants and inclinations of individuals; and 
 
98.] ATOMISM. 183 
 
 the Universal, or the State itself, is the external nexus 
 of a compact. 
 
 (i) The Atomic philosophy forms a vital stage in the 
 historical evolution of the Idea. The principle of that system 
 may be described as Being-for-selfin the shape of the Many. 
 At present, students of nature who are anxious to avoid 
 metaphysics turn a favourable ear to Atomism. But it is not 
 possible to escape metaphysics and cease to trace nature 
 back to terms of thought, by throwing ourselves into the 
 arms of Atomism. The atom, in fact, is itself a thought ; and 
 hence the theory which holds matter to.consist of atoms is 
 a metaphysical theory. Newton gave physics an express 
 warning to beware of metaphysics, it is true ; but, to his 
 honour be it said, he did not by any means obey his own 
 warning. The only mere physicists are the animals : they 
 alone do not think: while man is a thinking being and a 
 born metaphysician. The real question is not whether we 
 shall apply metaphysics, but whether our metaphysics are 
 of the right kind : in other words, whether we are not, in- 
 stead of the concrete logical Idea, adopting one-sided forms 
 of thought, rigidly fixed by understanding, and making these 
 the basis of our theoretical as well as our practical work. 
 It is on this ground that one objects to the Atomic philo- 
 sophy. The old Atomists viewed the world as a many, as 
 their successors often do to this day. On chance they laid 
 the task of collecting the atoms which float about in the 
 void. But, after all, the nexus binding the many with one 
 another is by no means a mere accident : as we have already 
 remarked, the nexus is founded on their very nature. To 
 Kant we owe the completed theory of matter as the unity 
 of repulsion and attraction. The theory is correct, so far 
 as it recognises attraction to be the other of the two elements 
 involved in the notion of Being-for-self : and to be an element 
 no less essential than repulsion to constitute matter. Still 
 this dynamical construction of matter, as it is termed, has 
 the fault of taking for granted, instead of deducing, attraction 
 and repulsion. Had they been deduced, we should then 
 have seen the How and the Why of a unity which is merely 
 asserted. Kant indeed was careful to inculcate that Matter 
 
184 THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. [98. 
 
 must not be taken to be in existence per se, and then as it 
 were incidentally to be provided with the two forces men- 
 tioned, but must be regarded as consisting solely in their 
 unity. German physicists for some time accepted this pure 
 dynamic. But in spite of this, the majority of these physicists 
 in modern times have found it more convenient to return to the 
 Atomic point of view, and in spite of the warnings of Kastner, 
 one of their number, have begun to regard Matter as con. 
 sisting of infinitesimally small particles, termed 'atoms' — 
 which atoms have then to be brought into relation with one 
 another by the play of forces attaching to them,— attractive, 
 repulsive, or whatever they may be. 1 his too is meta- 
 physics ; and metaphysics which, for its utter unintelligence, 
 there would be sufficient reason to guard against. 
 
 (2) The transition from Quality to Quantity, indicated in 
 the paragraph before us, is not found in our ordinary way of 
 thinking, which deems each of these categories to exist in- 
 dependently beside the other. We are in the habit of say- 
 ing that things are not merely qualitatively, but also quanti- 
 tatively defined ; but whence these categories originate, and 
 how they are related to each other, are questions not further 
 examined. The fact is, quantity just means quaUty super- 
 seded and absorbed : and it is by the dialectic of quality 
 here examined that this supersession is effected. First of all, 
 we had Being : as the truth of Being, came Becoming : 
 which formed the passage to Being Determinate : and the 
 truth of that we found to be Alteration. And in its result 
 Alteration showed itself to be Being-for-self, exempt from 
 implication of another and from passage into another ;— 
 which Being-for-self, finally, in the two sides of its process, 
 Repulsion and Attraction, was clearly seen to annul itself, 
 and thereby to annul quality in the totality of its stages. 
 Still this superseded and absorbed quality is neither an ab- 
 stract nothing, nor an equally abstract and featureless being : 
 it is only being as indifferent to determinateness or character. 
 This aspect of being is also what appears as quantity in our 
 ordinary conceptions. We observe things, first of all, with 
 an eye to their quality — which we take to be the character 
 identical with the being of the thing. If we proceed to con- 
 
98-99-] QUANTITY. 185 
 
 sider their quantity, we get the conception of an indifferent 
 and external character or mode, of such a kind that a thing 
 remains what it is, though its quantity is altered, and the 
 thing becomes greater or less. 
 
 B. — Quantity. 
 {a) Pure Quantity. 
 
 99.] Quantity is pure being, where the mode or 
 character is no longer taken as one with the being 
 itself, but explicitly put as superseded or indifferent. 
 
 (i) The expression Magnitude especially marks de- 
 terminate Quantity, and is for that reason not a suitable 
 name for Quantity in general. (2) Mathematics usually 
 define magnitude as what can be increased or dimi- 
 nished. This definition has the defect of containing 
 the thing to be defined over again : but it may serve 
 to show that the category of magnitude is explicitly 
 understood to be changeable and indifferent, so that, 
 in spite of its being altered by an increased extension 
 or intension, the thing, a house, for example, does not 
 cease to be a house, and red to be red. {3) The Abso- 
 lute is pure Quantity. This point of view is upon the 
 whole the same as when the Absolute is defined to be 
 Matter, in which, though form undoubtedly is present, 
 the form is a characteristic of no importance one way 
 or another. Quantity too constitutes the main charac- 
 teristic of the Absolute, when the Absolute is regarded 
 as absolute indifference, and only admitting of quanti- 
 tative distinction.— Otherwise pure space, time, &c. may 
 be taken as examples of Quantity, if we allow ourselves 
 to regard the real as whatever fills up space and time, 
 it matters not with what. 
 
 The mathematical definition of magnitude as what may be 
 increased or diminished, appears at first sight to be more 
 
l86 THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. [99. 
 
 plausible and perspicuous than the exposition of the notion 
 in the present section. When closely examined, however, it 
 involves, undercover of pre-suppositions andimages.the same 
 elements as appear in the notion of quantity reached by the 
 method of logical development. In other words, when we 
 say that the notion of magnitude lies in the possibility of 
 being increased or diminished, we state that magnitude (or 
 more correctly, quantity), as distinguished from quality, is a 
 characteristic of such kind that the characterised thing is not 
 in the least affected by any change in it. What then, it may 
 be asked, is the fault which we have to find with this defini- 
 tion? It is that to increase and to diminish is the same 
 thing as to characterise magnitude otherwise. If this aspect 
 then were an adequate account of it, quantity would be 
 described merely as whatever can be altered. But quality 
 is no less than quantity open to alteration ; and the distinction 
 here given between quantity and quality is expressed by 
 saying increase or diminution : the meaning being that, 
 towards whatever side the determination of magnitude be 
 altered, the thing still remains what it is. 
 
 One remark more. Throughout philosophy we do not seek 
 merely for correct, still less for plausible definitions, whose 
 correctness appeals directly to the popular imagination ; we 
 seek approved or verified definitions, the content of which 
 is not assumed merely as given, but is seen and known to 
 warrant itself, because warranted by the free self-evolution 
 of thought. To apply this to the present case. However 
 correct and self-evident the definition of quantity usual in 
 Mathematics may be, it will still fail to satisfy the wish to 
 see how far this particular thought is founded in universal 
 thought, and in that way necessary. This difficulty, how- 
 ever, is not the only one. If quantity is not reached through 
 the action of thought, but taken uncritically from our general- 
 ised image of it, we are liable to exaggerate the range of its 
 validity, or even to raise it to the height of an absolute cate- 
 gory. And that such a danger is real, we see when the title 
 of exact science is restricted to those sciences the objects of 
 which can be submitted to mathematical calculation. Here 
 we have another trace of the bad metaphysics (mentioned in 
 
99.] THE MATHEMATICAL CATEGORIES. 187 
 
 § 98, note) which replace the concrete idea bj' partial and in- 
 adequate categories of understanding. Our knowledge would 
 be in a very awkward predicament if such objects as free- 
 dom, law, morality, or even God Himself, because they cannot 
 be measured and calculated, or expressed in a mathematical 
 formula, were to be reckoned beyond the reach of exact 
 knowledge, and we had to put up with a vague generalised 
 image of them, leaving their details or particulars to the 
 pleasure of each individual, to make out of them what he 
 will. The pernicious consequences, to which such a theory 
 gives rise in practice, are at once evident. And this mere 
 mathematical view, which identifies with the Idea one of its 
 special stages, viz. quantity, is no other than the principle of 
 Materialism. Witness the history of the scientific modes of 
 thought, especially in France since the middle of last century. 
 Matter, in the abstract, is just what, though of course there is 
 form in it, has that form only as an indifferent and external 
 attribute. 
 
 The present explanation would be utterly misconceived if 
 it were supposed to disparage mathematics. By calling the 
 quantitative characteristic merely external and indifferent, 
 we provide no excuse for indolence and superficiality, nor do 
 we assert that quantitative characteristics may be left to mind 
 themselves, or at least require no very careful handling. 
 Quantity, of course, is a stage of the Idea : and as such it 
 must have its due, first as a logical category, and then in the 
 world of objects, natural as well as spiritual. Still even so, 
 there soon emerges the different importance attaching to the 
 category of quantity according as its objects belong to the 
 natural or to the spiritual world. For in Nature, where the 
 form of the Idea is to be other than, and at the same time out- 
 side, itself, greater importance is for that very reason attached 
 to quantity than in the spiritual world, the world of free in- 
 wardness. No doubt we regard even spiritual facts under a 
 quantitative point of view ; but it is at once apparent that in 
 speaking of God as a Trinity, the number three has by no 
 means the same prominence, as when we consider the three 
 dimensions of space or the three sides of a triangle ;— the 
 fundamental feature of which last is just to be a surface 
 
l88 THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. [99-100. 
 
 bounded by three lines. Even inside the realm of Nature 
 we find the same distinction of greater or less importance of 
 quantitative features. In the inorganic world, Quantity plays, 
 so to say, a more prominent part than in the organic. Even 
 in organic nature when we distinguish mechanical functions 
 from what are called chemical, and in the narrower sense, 
 physical, there is the same difference. Mechanics is of all 
 branches of science, confessedly, that in which the aid -of 
 mathematics can be least dispensed with, — where indeed we 
 cannot take one step without them. On that account me- 
 chanics is regarded next to mathematics as the science par 
 excellence ; which leads us to repeat the remark about the 
 coincidence of the materialist with the exclusively mathe- 
 matical point of view. After all that has been said, we can- 
 not but hold it, in the interest of exact and thorough know- 
 ledge, one of the most hurtful prejudices, to seek all dis- 
 tinction and determinateness of objects merely in quantitative 
 considerations. Mind to be sure is more than Nature and 
 the animal is more than the plant : but we know very little 
 of these objects and the distinction between them, if a more 
 and less is enough for us, and if we do not proceed to com- 
 prehend them in their peculiar, that is their qualitative 
 character, 
 
 100.] Quantity, as we saw, has two sources : the 
 exclusive unit, and the identification or equahsation 
 of these units. When we look therefore at its imme- 
 diate relation to self, or at the characteristic of self- 
 sameness made explicit by attraction, quantity is Con- 
 tinuous magnitude ; but when we look at the other 
 characteristic, the One implied in it, it is Discrete 
 magnitude. Still continuous quantity has also a certain 
 discreteness, being but a continuity of the Many : and 
 discrete quantity is no less continuous, its continuity 
 being the One or Unit, that is, the self-same point of 
 the many Ones. 
 
 (i) Continuous and Discrete magnitude, therefore, 
 must not be supposed two species of magnitude, as 
 
loo.] CONTINUOUS AND DISCRETE. 189 
 
 if the characteristic of the one did not attach to the 
 other. The only distinction between them is that the 
 same whole (of quantity) is at one time explicitly put 
 under the one, at another under the other of its cha- 
 racteristics. (2) The Antinomy of space, of time, or of 
 matter, which discusses the question of their being divi- 
 sible for ever, or of consisting of indivisible units, just 
 means that we maintain quantity as at one time Dis- 
 crete, at another Continuous. If we explicitly invest 
 time, space, or matter with the attribute of Continuous 
 quantity alone, they are divisible ad infinitum. When, 
 on the contrary, they are invested with the attribute 
 of Discrete quantity, they are potentially divided al- 
 ready, and consist of indivisible units. The one view 
 is as inadequate as the other. 
 
 Quantity, as the proximate result of Being-for-self, in- 
 volves the two sides in the process of the latter, attraction 
 and repulsion, as constitutive elements of its own idea; It is 
 consequently Continuous as well as Discrete. Each of these 
 two elements involves the other also, and hence there is no 
 such thing as a merely Continuous or a merely Discrete 
 quantity. We may speak of the two as two particular and 
 opposite species of magnitude ; but that is merely the result 
 of our abstracting reflection, which in viewing definite magni- 
 tudes waives now the one, now the other, of the elements 
 contained in inseparable unity in the notion of quantity. 
 Thus, it may be said, the space occupied by this room is a 
 continuous magnitude, and the hundred men, assembled in 
 it, form a discrete magnitude. And yet the space is con- 
 tinuous and discrete at the same time ; hence we speak of 
 points of space, or we divide space, a certain length, into so 
 many feet, inches, &c., which can be done only on the hypo- 
 thesis that space is also potentially discrete. Similarly, on 
 the other hand, the discrete magnitude, made up of a 
 hundred men, is also continuous : and the circumstance on 
 which this continuity depends, is the common element, the 
 
190 THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. [100-102. 
 
 species man, which pervades all the individuals and unites 
 them with each other. 
 
 (b) Quantum {How Much). 
 
 101.] Quantity, essentially invested with the exclu- 
 sionist character which it involves, is Quantum (or 
 How Much): i.e. limited quantity. 
 
 Quantum is, as it were, the determinate Being of quantity: 
 whereas mere quantity corresponds to abstract Being, and 
 the Degree, which is next to be considered, corresponds to 
 Being-for-self. As for the details of the advance from mere 
 quantity to quantum, it is founded on this : that whilst in 
 mere quantity the distinction, as a distinction of continuity 
 and discreteness, is at first only implicit, in a quantum the 
 distinction is actually made, so that quantity in general now 
 appears as distinguished or limited. But in this way the 
 quantum breaks up at the same time into an indefinite 
 multitude of Quanta or definite magnitudes. Each of these 
 definite magnitudes, as distinguished from the others, forms 
 a unity, while on the other hand, viewed per se, it is a many. 
 And, when that is done, the quantum is described as 
 Number. 
 
 102.] In Number the quantum reaches its develop- 
 ment and perfect mode. Like the One, the medium 
 in which it exists, Number involves two qualitative 
 factors or functions; Annumeration or Sum, which 
 depends on the factor discreteness, and Unity, which 
 depends on continuity. 
 
 In arithmetic the several kinds of operation are 
 usually presented as accidental modes of dealing with 
 numbers. If necessity and meaning is to be found 
 in these operations, it must be by a principle : and 
 that must come from the characteristic elements in the 
 notion of number itself (This principle must here be 
 briefly exhibited.) These characteristic elements are 
 Annumeration on the one hand, and Unity on the 
 
loa.] NUMBER. I9I 
 
 Other, which together constitute number. But Unity, 
 when applied to empirical numbers, is only the equality 
 of these numbers : hence the principle of arithmetical 
 operations must be to put numbers in the ratio of Unity 
 and Sum (or amount), and to elicit the equality of these 
 two modes. 
 
 The Ones or the numbers themselves are indifferent 
 towards each other, and hence the unity into which 
 they are translated by the arithmetical operation takes 
 the aspect of an external colligation. All reckoning 
 is therefore making up the tale : and the difference 
 between the species of it lies only in the qualitative 
 constitution of the numbers of which we make up the 
 tale. The principle for this constitution is given by 
 the way we fix Unity and Annumeration. 
 
 Numeration comes first: what we may call, making 
 number; a colligation of as many units as we please. 
 But to get a species of calculation, it is necessary that 
 what we count up should be numbers already, and no 
 longer a mere unit. 
 
 First, and as they naturally come to hand. Numbers 
 are quite vaguely numbers in general, and so, on the 
 whole, unequal. The colligation, or telling the tale 
 of these, is Addition. 
 
 The second point of view under which we regard 
 numbers is as equal, so that they make one unity, and 
 of such there is an annumeration or sum before us. 
 To tell the tale of these is Multiplication. It makes 
 no matter in the process, how the functions of Sum 
 and Unity are distributed between the two numbers, 
 or factors of the product ; either may be Sum and 
 either may be Unity. 
 
 The third and final point of view is the equality of 
 Sum (amount) and Unity. To number together num- 
 bers when so characterised is Involution; and in the 
 
192 THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. 102-103. 
 
 first instance raising them to the square power. To 
 raise the number to a higher power means in point 
 of form to go on multiplying a number with itself an 
 indefinite amount of times. — Since this third type of 
 calculation exhibits the complete equality of the sole 
 existing distinction in number, viz. the distinction be- 
 tween Sum or amount and Unity, there can be no 
 more than these three modes of calculation. Corre- 
 sponding to the integration we have the dissolution of 
 numbers according to the same features. Hence besides 
 the three species mentioned, which may to that extent 
 be called positive, there are three negative species of 
 arithmetical operation. 
 
 Number, in general, is the quantum in its complete spe- 
 cialisation. Hence we may employ it not only to determine 
 what we call discrete, but what are called continuous magni- 
 tudes as well. For that reason even geometry must call in 
 the aid of number, when it is required to specify definite 
 figurations of space and their ratios. 
 
 {c) Degree. 
 
 103.] The limit (in a quantum) is identical with the 
 whole of the quantum itself. As in itself multiple, the 
 limit is Extensive magnitude ; as in itself simple deter- 
 minateness (qualitative simplicity), it is Intensive mag- 
 nitude or Degree. 
 
 The distinction between Continuous and Discrete 
 magnitude differs from that between Extensive and 
 Intensive in the circumstance that the former apply 
 to quantity in general, while the latter apply to the 
 limit or determinateness of it as such. Intensive and 
 Extensive magnitude are not, any more than the other, 
 two species, of which the one involves a character not 
 possessed by the other : what is Extensive magnitude 
 is just as much Intensive, and vice versa. 
 
I03.J INTENSIVE AND EXTENSIVE QUANTITY. 1 93 
 
 Intensive magnitude or Degree is in its notion distinct 
 from Extensive magnitude or the Quantum. It is therefore 
 inadmissible to refuse, as many do, to recognise this dis- 
 tinction, and vi^ithout scruple to identify the two forms of 
 magnitude. They are so identified in physics, when differ- 
 ence of specific gravity is explained by saying, that a body, 
 with a specific gravity twice that of another, contains within 
 the same space twice as many material parts (or atoms) as 
 the other. So with heat and light, if the various degrees of 
 temperature and brilliancy were to be explained by the 
 greater or less number of particles (or molecules) of heat and 
 light. No doubt the physicists, who employ such a mode of 
 explanation, usually excuse themselves, when they are re- 
 monstrated with on its untenableness, by saying that the ex- 
 pression is without prejudice to the confessedly unknowable 
 essence of such phenomena, and employed merely for greater 
 convenience. This greater convenience is meant to point to 
 the easier application of the calculus : but it is hard to see 
 why Intensive magnitudes, having, as they do, a definite 
 numerical expression of their own, should not be as con- 
 venient for calculation as Extensive magnitudes. If con- 
 venience be all that is desired, surely it would be more con- 
 venient to banish calculation and thought altogether. A 
 further point against the apology offered by the physicists is, 
 that, to engage in explanations of this kind, is to overstep the 
 sphere of perception and experience, and resort to the realm 
 of metaphysics and of what at other times would be called 
 idle or even pernicious speculation. It is certainly a fact of 
 experience that, if one of two purses filled with shillings is 
 twice as hea\'y as the other, the reason must be, that the one 
 contains, say two hundred, and the other only one hundred 
 shillings. These pieces of money we can see and feel with 
 our senses : atoms, molecules, and the like, are on the con- 
 trary beyond the range of sensuous perception ; and thought 
 alone can decide whether they are admissible, and have a 
 meaning. But (as already noticed in § 98, note) it is abstract 
 understanding which stereotypes the factor of multeity 
 (involved in the notion of Being-for-self) in the shape of 
 atoms, and adopts it as an ultimate principle. It is the same 
 
194 ^^^ DOCTRINE OF BEING. [103-104. 
 
 abstract understanding which, in the present instance, at 
 equal variance with unprejudiced perception and with real 
 concrete thought, regards Extensive magnitude as the sole 
 form of'quantity, and, where Intensive magnitudes occur, does 
 not recognise them in their own character, but makes a vio- 
 lent attempt by a wholly untenable hypothesis to reduce 
 them to Extensive magnitudes. 
 
 Among the charges made against modern philosophy, one 
 is heard more than another. Modern philosophy, it is said, 
 reduces everything to identity. Hence its nicknapie, the 
 Philosophy of Identity. But the present discussion may 
 teach that it is philosophy, and philosophy alone, which insists 
 on distinguishing what is logically as well as in experience 
 different ; while the professed devotees of experience are the 
 people who erect abstract identity into the chief principle 
 of knowledge. It is their philosophy which might more ap- 
 propriately be termed one of identity. Besides it is quite cor- 
 rect that there are no merely Extensive and merely Intensive 
 magnitudes, just as little as there are merely continuous and 
 merely discrete magnitudes. The two characteristics of 
 quantity are not opposed as independent kinds. Every In- 
 tensive magnitude is also Extensive, and vice versa. Thus a 
 certain degree of temperature is an Intensive magnitude, 
 which has a perfectly simple sensation corresponding to it 
 as such. If we look at a thermometer, we find this degree 
 of temperature has a certain expansion of the column of 
 mercury corresponding to it ; which Extensive magnitude 
 changes simultaneously with the temperature or Intensive 
 magnitude. The case is similar in the world of mind : a 
 more intensive character has a wider range with its effects 
 than a less intensive. 
 
 104.] In Degree the notion of quantum is explicitly 
 put. It is magnitude as indifferent on its own account 
 and simple : but in such a way that the character (or 
 modal being) which makes it a quantum lies quite 
 outside it in other magnitudes. In this contradiction, 
 where the independent indifferent limit is absolute ex- 
 ternality, the Infinite Quantitative Progression is made 
 
104.] THE INFINITE PROGRESSION. 195 
 
 explicit— an immediacy which immediately veers round 
 into its counterpart, into mediation (the passing beyond 
 and over the quantum just laid down), and vice versa. 
 
 Number is a thought, but thought in its complete 
 self-externalisation. Because it is a thought, it does 
 not belong to perception : but it is a thought which is 
 characterised by the externality of perception. — Not 
 only therefore may the quantum be increased or dimi- 
 nished without end : the very notion of quantum is 
 thus to push out and out beyond itself. The infinite 
 quantitative progression is only the meaningless repeti- 
 tion of one and the same contradiction, which attaches 
 to the quantum, both generally and, when explicitly in- 
 vested with its special character, as degree. Touching 
 the futility of enunciating this contradiction in the form 
 of infinite progression, Zeno, as quoted by Aristotle, 
 rightly says, ' It is the same to say a thing once, and 
 to say it for ever.' 
 
 (i) If we follow the usual definition of the mathematicians, 
 given in § 99, and say that magnitude is what can be in- 
 creased or diminished, there may be nothing to urge against 
 the correctness of the perception on which it is founded ; but 
 the question remains, how we come to assume such a 
 capacity of increase or diminution. If we simply appeal for 
 an answer to experience, we try an unsatisfactory course ; 
 because apart from the fact that we should merely have a 
 material image of magnitude, and not the thought of it, 
 magnitude would come out as a bare possibility (of increas- 
 ing or diminishing) and we should have no key to the neces- 
 sity for its exhibiting this behaviour. In the way of our 
 logical evolution, on the contrary, quantity is obviously a 
 grade in the process of self-determining thought ; and it has 
 been shown that it lies in the very notion of quantity to 
 shoot out beyond itself In that way, the increase or dimi- 
 nution (of which we have heard) is not merely possible, but 
 necessary. 
 
196 THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. [104. 
 
 (2) The quantitative infinite progression is what the re- 
 flective understanding usually relies upon when it is en- 
 gaged with the general question of Infinity. The same thing 
 however holds good of this progression, as was already 
 remarked on the occasion of the qualitatively infinite pro- 
 gression. As was then said, it is not the expression of a 
 true, but of a wrong infinity' ; it never gets further than a 
 bare 'ought,' and thus really remains within the limits of 
 finitude. The quantitative form of this infinite progression, 
 which Spinoza rightly calls a mere imaginary infinity 
 {infinitum imaginafionis), is an image often employed by 
 poets, such as Haller and Klopstock, to depict the infinity, 
 not of Nature merely, but even of God Himself. Thus we 
 find Haller, in a famous description of God's " infinity, 
 saying : 
 
 3c^ I>nife ungct)ciirc 3al)(fn, 
 
 ©ebirge 9)ii(lionfn auf, 
 
 5(^ fc|e 3eit auf 3ett 
 
 Unb SBelt auf ©ctt ju ipauf, 
 
 Unb trenn i* von bet graufen ^b^' 
 
 9Wit @cfcuMube( uncber iiacf) I)iv fe"^ : 
 
 3ft a((e 2«ac^t ber 3a{)l, 
 
 S^erntfftvt ju Saufnibniat, 
 
 9Jo(J> ni^t eiu %\){\[ »ou iDir. 
 
 [I heap up monstrous numbers, mountains of millions • I 
 pile time upon time, and world on the top of world ; and 
 when from the aw.^ul height I cast a dizzy look towards 
 Thee, all the power of number, multiplied a thousand times, 
 is not yet one part of Thee.] 
 
 Here then we meet, in the first place, that continual ex- 
 trusion of quantity, and especially of number, beyond itself, 
 which Kant describes as 'eery.' The only really 'eery' 
 th^ng about it is the wearisomeness of ever fixing, and anon 
 unfixing a limit, without advancing a single step. The same 
 poet however well adds to that description of false infinity 
 the closing line : 
 
 3^ l\i\) jle ab, nnb ©u (iegft ganj vor ntir. 
 
 [These I remove, and Thou liest all before me. J 
 
I04.] PYTH 4GOREAN PHILOSOPHY. 197 
 
 Which means, that the true infinite is more than a mere 
 world beyond the finite, and ihat we, in order to become 
 conscii^us of it, must renounce that progressus in infimtum. 
 
 (3) Pythagoras, as is well known, philosophised in num- 
 bers, and conceived number as the fundamental principle of 
 things. To the ordinary mind this view must at first glance 
 seem an utter part-dox, perhaps a mere craze. What, then, 
 are we to think of it? To answer this question, we must, 
 in the first place, remember that the problem of philosophy 
 consists in tracing back things to thoughts, and, of course, to 
 definite thoughts. Now, number is undoubtedly a thought : 
 it is the thought nearest the sensible, or, more precisely 
 expressed, it is the thought of the sensible itself, if we take 
 the sensible to mean what is many, and in reciprocal ex- 
 clusion. The attempt to apprehend the universe as number 
 is therefore the first step to metaphysics. In the history of 
 philosophy, Pythagoras, as we know, stands between the 
 Ionian philosophers and the Eleatics. While the former, as 
 Aristotle says, never get beyond viewing the essence of 
 things as material {vXrj), and the latter, especially Parmenides, 
 advanced as* far as pure thought, in the shape of Being, the 
 principle of the Pythagorean philosophy forms, as it were, 
 the bridge from the sensible to the super-sensible. 
 
 We may gather from this, what is to be said of those who 
 suppose that Pythagoras undoubtedly went too far, when he 
 conceived the essence of things as mere number. It is true, 
 they admit, that. we can number things; but, they contend, 
 things are far more than mere numbers. But in what re- 
 spect are they more? The ordinary sensuous conscious- 
 ness, from its own point of view, would not hesitate to 
 answer the question by handing us over to sensuous per- 
 ception, and remarking, that things are not merely numer- 
 able, but also visible, odorous, palpable, &c. In the phrase 
 of modern times, the fault of Pythagoras would be described 
 as an excess of idealism. As may be gathered from what 
 has been said on the historical position of the Pythagorean 
 school, the real state of the case is quite the reverse. Let 
 it be conceded that things are more than numbers ; but 
 the meaning of that admission must be that the bare 
 
igS THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. '^104-105. 
 
 thought of number is still insufficient to enunciate the 
 definite notion or essence of things. Instead, then, of say- 
 ing that Pythagoras went too far with his philosophy of 
 number, it would be nearer the truth to say that he did not 
 go far enough ; and in fact the Eleatics were the first to take 
 the further step to pure thought. 
 
 Besides, even if there are not things, there are states of 
 things, and phenomena of nature altogether, the character of 
 which mainly rests on definite numbers and proportions. This 
 is especially the case with the difference of tones and their 
 harmonic concord, which, according to a well-known 
 tradition, first suggested to Pythagoras to conceive the 
 essence of things as number. Though it is unquestionably 
 important to science to trace back these phenomena to the 
 definite numbers on which they are based, it is wholly in- 
 admissible to view the characterisation by thought as a 
 whole, as merely numerical. We may certainly feel our- 
 selves prompted to associate the most general characteristics 
 of thought with the first numbers : saying, i is the simple 
 and immediate ; 2 is difference and mediation ; and 3 the 
 unity of both of these. Such associations however are 
 purely external : there is nothing in the mere numbers to 
 make them express these definite thoughts. With every step 
 in this method, the more arbitrary grows the association of 
 definite numbers with definite thoughts. Thus, we may 
 view 4 as the unity of i and 3, and of the thoughts associated 
 with them, but 4 is just as much the double of 2 ; similarly 9 
 is not merely the square of 3, but also the sum of 8 and i, of 
 7 and 2, and so on. To attach, as do some secret societies ol 
 modern times, importance to all sorts of numbers and 
 figures, is to some extent an innocent amusement, but it is 
 also a sign of deficiency of intellectual resource. These 
 numbers, it is said, conceal a profound meaning, and suggest 
 a deal to think about. But the point in philosophy is, not 
 what you may think, but what you do think : and the genuine 
 air of thought is to be sought in thought itself, and not in 
 arbitrarily selected symbols. 
 
 105.] That the Quantum in its independent character 
 is external to itself, is what constitutes its quality. In 
 
I05-106.] NUMBER AND RATIO. 1 99 
 
 that externality it is itself and referred connectively to 
 itself. There is a union in it of externality, i.e. the 
 quantitative, and of independency (Being-for-self),^the 
 qualitative. The Quantum when explicitly put thus 
 in its own self, is the Quantitative Ratio, a mode of 
 being which, while, in its Exponent, it is an immediate 
 quantum, is also mediation, viz. the reference of some 
 one quantum to another, forming the two sides of the 
 ratio. But the two quanta are not reckoned at their 
 immediate value : their value is only in this relation. 
 
 The quantitative infinite progression appears at first as a 
 continual extrusion of number beyond itself. On looking 
 closer, it is, however, apparent that in this progression 
 quantity returns to itself: for the meaning of this progres- 
 sion, so far as thought goes, is the fact that number is detei*- 
 mined by number. And this gives the quantitative ratio. 
 Take, for example, the ratio 2:4. Here we have two 
 magnitudes (not counted in their several immediate values) 
 in which we are only concerned with their mutual relations. 
 This relation of the two terms (the exponent of the ratio) is 
 itself a magnitude, distinguished from the related magni- 
 tudes by this, that a change in it is followed by a change of 
 the ratio, whereas the ratio is unaffected by the change of 
 both its sides, and remains the same so long as the exponent 
 is not changed. Consequently, in place of 2:4, we can put 
 3 : 6 without changing the ratio ; as the exponent 2 remains 
 the same in both cases. 
 
 106.] The two sides of the ratio are still immediate 
 quanta : and the qualitative and quantitative character- 
 istics still external to one another. But in their truth, 
 seeing that the quantitative itself in its externality is 
 relation to self, or seeing that the independence and 
 the indifference of the character are combined, it is 
 Measure. 
 
 Thus quantity by means of the dialectical movement so far 
 studied through its several stages, turns out to be a return to 
 
200 THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. [106, 
 
 quality. The first notion of quantity presented to us was 
 that of quaUty abrogated and absorbed. That is to say, 
 quantity seemed an external character not identical with 
 Being, to which it is quite immaterial. This notion, as we 
 have seen, underlies the mathematical definition of magni- 
 tude as what can be increased or diminished. At first sight 
 this definition may create the impression that quantity is 
 merely whatever can be altered : — increase and diminution 
 alike implying determination of magnitude otherwise— and 
 may tend to confuse it with determinate Being, the second 
 stage of quality, which in its notion is similarly conceived as 
 alterable. We can, however, complete the definition by 
 adding, that in quantity we have an alterable, which in spite 
 of alterations still remains the same. The notion of quantity, 
 it thus turns out, implies an inherent contradiction. This 
 contradiction is what forms the dialectic of quantity. The 
 result of the dialectic however is not a mere return to 
 quality, as if that were the true and quantity the false notion, 
 but an advance to the unity and truth of both, to qualitative 
 quantity, or Measure. 
 
 It may be well therefore at this point to observe that 
 whenever in our study of the objective world we are engaged 
 in quantitative determinations, it is in all cases Measure 
 which we have in view, as the goal of our operations. 
 This is hinted at even in language, when the ascertainment 
 of quantitative features and relations is called measuring. We 
 measure, e.g. the length of different chords that have been 
 put into a state of vibration, with an eye to the qualitative 
 difference of the tones caused by their vibration, correspond- 
 ing to this difference of length. Similarly, in chemistry, we 
 try to ascertain the quantity of the matters brought into 
 combination, in order to find out the measures or pro- 
 portions conditioning such combinations, that is to say, those 
 quantities which give rise to definite qualities. In statistics, 
 too, the numbers with which the study is engaged are im- 
 portant only from the qualitative results conditioned by them. 
 Mere collection of numerical facts, prosecuted without re- 
 gard to the ends here noted, is justly called an exercise of 
 idle curiosity, of neither theoretical nor practical interest. 
 
MEASURE. 
 
 C. — MEASURE. 
 
 107.] Measure is the qualitative quantum, in the 
 first place as immediate, — a quantum, to which a deter- 
 minate being or a quality is attached. 
 
 Measure, where quality and quantity are in one, is thus 
 the completion of Being. Being, as we first apprehend it, is 
 something utterly abstract and characterless : but it is the 
 very essence of Being to characterise itself, and its complete 
 characterisation is reached in Measure. Measure, like the 
 other stages of Being, may serve as a definition of the 
 Absolute : God, it has been said, is the Measure of all things. 
 It is this idea which forms the ground-note of many of the 
 ancient Hebrew hymns, in which the glorification of God 
 tends in the main to show that He has appointed to every- 
 thing its bound : to the sea and the solid land, to the rivers 
 and mountains ; and also to the various kinds of plants and 
 animals. To the religious sense of the Greeks the divinity 
 of measure, especially in respect of social ethics, was re- 
 presented by Nemesis. That conception implies a general 
 theory that all human things, riches, honour, and power, as 
 well as joy and pain, have their definite measure, the trans- 
 gression of which brings ruin and destruction. In the world 
 of objects, too, we have measure. We see, in the first place, 
 existences in Nature, of which measure forms the essential 
 structure. This is the case, for example, with the solar 
 system, which may be described as the realm of free 
 measures. As we next proceed to the study of inorganic 
 nature, measure retires, as it were, into the background ; 
 at least we often find the quantitative and qualitative 
 characteristics showing indifference to each other. Thus the 
 quality of a rock or a river is nof tied to a definite magni- 
 tude. But even these objects when closely inspected are 
 found not to be quite measureless : the water of a river, and 
 the single constituents of a rock, when chemically analysed, 
 are seen to be qualities conditioned by quantitative ratios 
 between the matters they contain. In organic nature, how- 
 ever, measure again rises full into immediate perception. 
 
202 THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. [107-108. 
 
 The various kinds of plants and animals, in the whole as 
 well as in their parts, have a certain measure : though it is 
 worth noticing that the more imperfect forms, those which 
 are least removed from inorganic nature, are partly dis- 
 tinguished from the higher forms by the greater indefinite- 
 ness of their measure. Thus among fossils, we find some 
 ammonites discernible only by the microscope, and others 
 as large as a cart-wheel. The same vagueness of measure 
 appears in several plants, which stand on a low level of 
 organic development, — for instance, ferns. 
 
 108.] In so far as in Measure quality and quantity 
 are only in immediate unity, to that extent their differ- 
 ence presents itself in a manner equally immediate. 
 Two cases are then possible. Either the specific quan- 
 tum or measure is a bare quantum, and the definite 
 being (there-and-then) is capable of an increase or a 
 diminution, without Measure (which to that extent is 
 a Rule) being thereby set completely aside. Or the 
 alteration of the quantum is also an alteration of the 
 quality. 
 
 The identity between quantity and quality, which is found 
 in Measure, is at first only implicit, and not yet explicitly 
 realised. In other words, these two categories, which unite 
 in Measure, each claim an independent authority. On the 
 one hand, the quantitative features of existence may be 
 altered, without aflFecting its quality. On the other hand, this 
 increase and diminution, immaterial though it be, has its 
 limit, by exceeding which the quality suffers change. Thus 
 the temperature of water is, in the first place, a point of no 
 consequence in respect of its liquidity : still with the increase 
 or diminution of the temperature of the liquid water, there 
 comes a point where this state of cohesion suffers a quali- 
 tative change, and the water is converted into steam or ice. 
 A quantitative change takes place, apparently without any 
 further significance : but there is something lurking behind, 
 and a seemingly innocent change of quantity acts as a 
 kind of snare, to catch hold of the quality. The antinomy 
 
io8.] MEASURE. 203 
 
 of Measure which this implies was exemplified under more 
 than one garb among the Greeks. It was asked, for example, 
 whether a single grain makes a heap of wheat, or whether 
 it makes a bald-tail to tear out a single hair from the horse's 
 tail. At first, no doubt, looking at the nature of quantity as 
 an indifferent and external character of Being, we are dis- 
 posed to answer these questions in the negative. And yet, 
 as we must admit, this indifferent increase and diminution 
 has its limit : a point is finally reached, where a single 
 additional grain makes a heap of wheat ; and the bald-tail 
 is produced, if we continue plucking out single hairs. These 
 examples find a parallel in the storj' of the peasant who, as 
 his ass trudged cheerfully along, went on adding ounce after 
 ounce to its load, till at length it sunk under the unendurable 
 burden. It would be a mistake to treat these examples as 
 pedantic futility ; they really turn on thoughts, an acquain- 
 tance with which is of great importance in practical life, 
 especially in ethics. Thus in the matter of expenditure, there 
 is a certain latitude within which a more or less does not 
 matter ; but when the Measure, imposed by the individual 
 circumstances of the special case, is exceeded on the one 
 side or the other, the qualitative nature of Measure (as in the 
 above examples of the different temperature of water) makes 
 itself felt, and a course, which a moment before was held 
 good economy, turns into avarice or prodigality. The same 
 principle may be applied in politics, when the constitution of 
 a state has to be looked at as independent of, no less than as 
 dependent on, the extent of its territory, the number of its 
 inhabitants, and other quantitative points of the same kind. 
 If we look e.g. at a state with a territory of ten thousand 
 square miles and a population of four millions, we should, 
 without hesitation, admit that a few square miles of land or 
 a few thousand inhabitants more or less could exercise no 
 essential influence en the character of its constitution. But, 
 on the other hand, we must not forget, that by the continual 
 increase or diminishing of a state, we finally get to a point 
 where, apart from all other circumstances, this quantitative 
 alteration alone necessarily draws with it an alteration in the 
 quality of the constitution. The constitution of a little Swiss 
 
204 THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. [108 no. 
 
 canton does not suit a great kingdom ; and, similarly, the 
 constitution of the Roman republic was unsuitable when 
 transferred to the small imperial towns of Germany. 
 
 109.] In this second case, when a measure through 
 its quantitative nature has gone in excess of its qualita- 
 tive character, we meet, what is at first an absence of 
 measure, the Measureless. But seeing that the second 
 quantitative ratio, which in comparison with the first is 
 measureless, is none the less qualitative, the measureless 
 is also a measure. These two transitions, from quality 
 to quantum, and from the latter back again to quality, 
 may be represented under the image of an infinite 
 progression — as the self-abrogation and restoration of 
 measure in the measureless. 
 
 Quantity, as we have seen, is not only capable of alteration, 
 i.e. of increase or diminution : it is naturally and necessarily 
 a tendency to exceed itself. This tendency is maintained 
 even in measure. But if the quantity present in measure 
 exceeds a certain limit, the quality corresponding to it is 
 also put in abeyance. This however is not a negation of 
 quality altogether, but only of this definite quality, the place 
 of which is at once occupied by another. This process of 
 measure, which appears alternately as a mere change in 
 quantity, and then as a sudden revulsion of quantity into 
 quality, may be envisaged under the figure of a nodal (knotted) 
 line. Such lines we find in Nature under a variety of forms. 
 We have already referred to the qualitatively different 
 states of aggregation water exhibits under increase or 
 diminution of temperature. The same phenomenon is pre- 
 sented by the different degrees in the oxidation of metals. 
 Even the difference of musical notes may be regarded as an 
 example of what takes place in the process of measure, — 
 the revulsion from what is at first merely quantitative into 
 qualitative alteration. 
 
 110.] What really takes place here is that the imme- 
 diacy, which still attaches to measure as such, is set 
 aside. In measure, at first, quality and quantity itself 
 
no -1 1 1.] MEASURE. 205 
 
 are immediate, and measure is only their ' relative ' 
 identity. But measure shows itself absorbed and super- 
 seded in the measureless : yet the measureless, although 
 it be the negation of measure, is itself a unity of quantity 
 and quality. Thus in the measureless the measure is 
 still seen to meet only with itself. 
 
 111.] Instead of the more abstract factors, Being and 
 Nothing, some and other, &c., the Infinite, which is 
 affirmation as a negation of negation, now finds its 
 factors in quality and quantity. These ( -) have in the 
 first place passed over, quality into quantity, (§ 98), and 
 quantity into quality (§ 105), and thus are both shown 
 up as negations. (iS) But in their unity, that is, in 
 measure, they are originally distinct, and the one is 
 only through the instrumentality of the other. And 
 (y) after the immediacy of this unity has turned out 
 to be self-annulling, the unity is explicitly put as what 
 it implicitly is, simple relation-to-self, which contains 
 in it being and all its forms absorbed. — Being or imme- 
 diacy, which by the negation of itself is a mediation 
 with self and a reference to self, — ^rhich consequently 
 is also a mediation which cancels itself into reference- 
 to-self, or immediacy, — is Essence. 
 
 The process of measure, instead of being only the wrong 
 infinite of an endless progression, in the shape of an ever- 
 recurrent recoil from quality to quantity, and from quantity to 
 quality, is also the true infinity of coincidence with self in 
 another. In measure, quality and quantity originally confront 
 each other, like some and other. But quality is implicitly 
 quantity, and conversely quantity is implicitly quality. In the 
 process of measure, therefore, these two pass into each other : 
 each of them becomes what it already was implicitly: and 
 thus we get Being thrown mto abeyance and absorbed, with 
 its several characteristics negatived. Such Being is Essence. 
 Measure is implicitly Essence ; and its process consists in 
 realising what it is implicitly. — The ordinary consciousness 
 
206 THE DOCTRINE OF BEING. [in. 
 
 conceives things as being, and studies them in quality, 
 quantity, and measure. These immediate characteristics how- 
 ever soon show themselves to be not fixed btit transient ; 
 and Essence is the result of their dialectic. In the sphere of 
 Essence one category does not pass into another, but refers 
 to another merely. In Being, the form of reference is 
 purely due to our reflection on what takes place : but it is 
 the special and proper characteristic of Essence. In the 
 sphere of Being, when somewhat becomes another, the 
 somewhat has vanished. Not so in Essence : here there is 
 no real other, but only diversity, reference of the one to its 
 other. The transition of Essence is therefore at the same 
 time no transition : for in the passage of different into 
 different, the different does not vanish : the different terms 
 remain in their relation. When we speak of Being and 
 Nought, Being is independent, so is Nought. The case is 
 otherwise with the Positive and the Negative. No doubt 
 these possess the characteristic of Being and Nought. But 
 the positive by itself has no sense ; it is wholly in reference 
 to the negative. And it is the same with the negative. In 
 the sphere of Being the reference of one term to another is 
 only implicit ; in Essence on the contrary it is explicit And 
 this in general is the distinction between the forms of Being 
 and Essence : in Being everything is immediate, in Essence 
 everything is relative. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 SECOND SUB-DIVISION OF LOGIC. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. 
 
 112.] The terms in Essence are always mere pairs of 
 correlatives, and not yet absolutely reflected in them- 
 selves : hence in essence the actual unity of the notion 
 is not realised, but only postulated by reflection. Es- 
 sence, — which is Being coming into mediation with itself 
 through the negativity of itself— is self-relatedness, only 
 in so far as it is relation to an Other, — this Other how- 
 ever coming to view at first not as something which 
 ts, but as postulated and hypothetised. — Being has not 
 vanished : but, firstly, Essence, as simple self-relation, 
 is Being, and secondly as regards its one-sided charac- 
 teristic of immediacy. Being is deposed to a mere nega- 
 tive, to a seeming or reflected light — Essence accordingly 
 is Being thus reflecting light into itself. 
 
 The Absolute is the Essence. This is the same defi- 
 nition as the previous one that the Absolute is Being, in 
 so far as Being likewise is simple self-relation. But it 
 is at the same time higher, because Essence is Being 
 that has gone into itself: that is to say, the simple self- 
 relation (in Being) is expressly put as negation of the 
 negative, as immanent self-mediation. — Unfortunately 
 when the Absolute is defined to be the Essence, the 
 negativity which this implies is often taken only to mean 
 the withdrawal of all determinate predicates. This 
 
2o3 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [112. 
 
 negative action of withdrawal or abstraction thus falls 
 outside of the Essence — which is thus left as a mere 
 result apart from its premisses.— the caput mortuum of 
 abstraction. But as this negativity, instead of being 
 external to Being, is its own dialectic, the truth of the 
 latter, viz. Essence, will be Being as retired within 
 itself, — immanent Being. That reflection, or light 
 thrown into itself, constitutes the distinction between 
 Essence and immediate Being, and is the peculiar 
 characteristic of Essence itself. 
 
 Any mention of Essence implies that we distinguish it 
 from Being : the latter is immediate, and, compared with the 
 Essence, we look upon it as mere seeming. But this seem- 
 ing is not an utter nonentity and nothing at all, but Being 
 superseded and put by. The point of view given by the 
 Essence is in general the standpoint of ' Reflection.' This 
 word ' reflection ' is originally applied, when a ray of light in 
 a straight line impinging upon the surface of a mirror is 
 thrown back from it. In this phenomenon we have two 
 things,— first an immediate fact which is, and secondly the 
 deputed, derivated, or transmitted phase of the same.— 
 Something of this sort takes place when we reflect, or think 
 upon an object ; for here we want to know the object, not in 
 its immediacy, but as derivative or mediated. The problem 
 or aim of philosophy is often represented as the ascertain- 
 ment of the essence of things : a phrase which only means 
 that things instead of being left in their immediacy, must be 
 shown to be mediated by, or based upon, something else. 
 The immediate Being of things is thus conceived under the 
 image of a rind or curtain behind which the Essence lies 
 hidden. 
 
 Everything, it is said, has an Essence ; that is, things 
 really are not what they immediately show themselves. 
 There is therefore something more to be done than merely 
 rove from one quality to another, and merely to advance 
 from qualitative to quantitative, and vice versa : there is 
 a permanent in things, and that permanent is in the first 
 
ria.] ESS EN I 209 
 
 instance their Essence. With respect to other meanings 
 and uses of the category of Essence, we may note that in 
 the German auxihary verb ' sein ' the past tense is expressed 
 by the term for Essence ( ^.?s^w) • we designate past being 
 as gewesen. This anomaly of language implies to some ex- 
 tent a correct perception of the relation between Being and 
 Essence. Essence we may certainly regard as past Being, 
 remembering however meanwhile that the past is not 
 utterly denied, but only laid aside and thus at the same time 
 preserved. Thus, to say, Caesar was in Gaul, only denies 
 the immediacy of the event, but not his sojourn in Gaul 
 altogether. That sojourn is just what forms the import of 
 the proposition, in which however it is represented as over 
 and gone.— ' PVesen' in ordinary life frequently means only 
 a collection or aggregate : Zeitungswesen (the Press), Post- 
 wesen (the Post-Office), Steuerwesen (the Revenue). All 
 that these terms mean is that the things in question are not to 
 be taken single, in theirimmediacy,but as a complex, and then, 
 perhaps, in addition, in their various bearings. This usage 
 of the term is not very different in its implication from ourown. 
 People also speak oi finite Essences, such as man. But 
 the very term Essence implies that we have made-q step 
 beyond finitude : and the title as applied to man is so far in- 
 exact. It is often added that there is a supreme Essence 
 (Being) : by which is meant God. On this two remarks 
 may be made. In the first place the phrase 'there is' 
 suggests a finite only : as when we say, there are so many 
 planets, or, there are plants of such a constitution and 
 plants of such an other. In these cases we are speaking of 
 something which has other things beyond and beside it. 
 But God, the absolutely infinite, is not something outside 
 and beside whom there are other essences. All else outside 
 God, if separated from Him, possesses no essentiality : in its 
 isolation it becomes a mere show or seeming, without stay or 
 essence of its own. But, secondly, it is a poor way of talking 
 to call God the highest or supreme Essence, The category 
 of quantity which the phrase employs has its proper place 
 within the compass of the finite. When we call one mountain 
 the highest on the earth, we have a vision of other high 
 
2IO THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [112. 
 
 mountains beside it. So too when we call any one the 
 richest or most learned in his country. But God, far from 
 being a Being, even the highest, is the Being. This definition, 
 however, though such a representation of God is an important 
 and necessary stage in the growth of the religious conscious- 
 ness, does not by any means exhaust the depth of the 
 ordinary Christian idea of God. If we consider God as the 
 Essence only, and nothing more, we know Him only as the 
 universal and irresistible Power ; in other words, as the 
 Lord. Now the fear of the Lord is, doubtless, the beginning, 
 — but only the beginning, of wisdom. To look at God in this 
 light, as the Lord, and the Lord alone, is especially character- 
 istic of Judaism and also of Mohammedanism. The defect of 
 these religions lies in their scant recognition of the finite, 
 which, be it as natural things or as finite phases of mind, it is 
 characteristic of the heathen and (as they also for that reason 
 are) polytheistic religions to maintain intact. Another not 
 uncommon assertion is that God, as the supreme Being, 
 cannot be known. Such is the view taken by modern 
 * enlightenment * and abstract understanding, which is con- 
 tent to say, II y a un etre supreme : and there lets the matter 
 rest. To speak thus, and treat God merely as the supreme 
 other-world Being, implies that we look upon the world 
 before us in its immediacy as something permanent and 
 positive, and forget that true Being is just the superseding of 
 all that is immediate. If God be the abstract super-sensible 
 Being, outside whom therefore lies all difference and all 
 specific character. He is only a bare name, a mere caput 
 mortuum of abstracting understanding. The true knowledge 
 of God begins when we know that things, as they im- 
 mediately are, have no truth. 
 
 In reference also to other subjects besides God the category 
 of Essence is often liable to an abstract use, by which, in the 
 study of anything, its Essence is held to be something unaf- 
 fected by, and subsisting in independence of, its definite pheno- 
 menal embodiment. Thus we say, for example, of people, 
 that the great thing is not what they do or how they behave, 
 but what they are. This is correct, if it means that a man's 
 conduct should be looked at, not in its immediacy, but only 
 
I12-II4.] ESSENCE — REFLECTION. 211 
 
 as it is explained by his inner self, and as a revelation of 
 that inner self. Still it should be remembered that the only 
 means by which the Essence and the inner self can be 
 verified, is their appearance in outward reality ; whereas 
 the appeal which men make to the essential life, as distinct 
 from the material facts of conduct, is generally prompted by 
 a desire to assert their own 'subjectivity and to elude an 
 absolute and objective judgment. 
 
 113.] Self-relation in Essence is the form of Identity 
 or of reflection-into-self, which has here taken the place 
 of the immediacy of Being. They are both the same 
 abstraction, — self-relation. 
 
 The unintelligence ofsei.se, to take everything limited 
 and finite for Being, passes into the obstinacy of under- 
 standing, which views the finite as self-identical, not in- 
 herently self-contradictory. 
 
 114.] This identity, as it has descended from Being, 
 appears in the first place only charged with the charac- 
 teristics of Being, and referred to Being as to something 
 external. This external Being, if taken in separation 
 from the true Being (of Essence), is called the Unessen- 
 tial. But that turns out a mistake. Because Essence 
 is Being-in-self, it is essential only to the extent that it 
 has in itself its negative, /'. e. reference to another, or 
 mediation. Consequently, it has the unessential as its 
 own proper seeming (reflection) in itself. But in seem- 
 ing or mediation there is distinction involved : and since 
 what is distinguished (as distinguished from the identity 
 out of which it arises, and in which it is not, or lies as 
 seeming,) receives itself the form of identit}', the sem- 
 blance is still in the mode of Being, or of self-related 
 immediacy. The sphere of Essence thus turns out to be 
 a still imperfect combination of immediacy and mediation. 
 I n it every term is expressly invested with the character of 
 self-relatedness, while yet at the same time one is forced 
 
 P 2 
 
212 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [114-115. 
 
 beyond it. It has Being, — reflected being, a being in 
 which another shows, and which shows in another. 
 And so it is also the sphere in which the contradiction, 
 still implicit in the sphere of Being, is made explicit. 
 
 As the one notion is the common principle underlying 
 all logic, there appear in the developrnent of Essence 
 the same attributes or terms as in the development of 
 Being, but in a reflex form. Instead of Being and 
 Nought we have now the forms of Positive and Nega- 
 tive ; the former at first as Identity corresponding to 
 pure and uncontrasted Being, the latter developed 
 (showing in itself) as Difference. So also, we have 
 Becoming represented by the Ground of determinate 
 Being: which itself, when reflected upon the Ground, 
 is Existence. 
 
 The theory of Essence is the most difficult branch 
 of Logic. It includes the categories of metaphysic and 
 of the sciences in general. These are products of re- 
 flective understanding, which, while it assumes the 
 differences to possess a footing of their own, and at 
 the same time also expressly affirms their relativity, 
 still «)mbines the two statements, side by side, or one 
 after the other, by an 'Also,' without bringing these 
 thoughts into one, or unifying them into the notion. 
 
 A. — Essence as Ground of Existence. 
 
 {a) The pure principles or categories of Reflection. 
 
 (a) Identity. 
 
 115.] The Essence lights up in itself or is mere reflec- 
 tion : and therefore is only self-relation, not as imme- 
 diate but as reflected. And that reflex relation is 
 self-Identity. 
 
 This Identity becomes an Identity in form only, or of 
 
115.] IDENTITY. 213 
 
 the understanding, if it be held hard and fast, quite aloof 
 from difference. Or, rather, abstraction is the imposi- 
 tion of this Identity of form, the transformation of some- 
 thing inherently ccuicrete into this form of elementary 
 simplicity. And this may be done in two ways. Either 
 we may neglect a part of the multiple features which are 
 found in the concrete thing (by what is called analysis) 
 and select only one of them ; or, neglecting their variety, 
 we may concentrate the multiple characters into one. 
 
 If we associate Identity with the Absolute, making 
 the Absolute the subject of a proposition, we get : The 
 Absolute is what is identical with itself. However true 
 this proposition may be, it is doubtful whether it be 
 meant in its truth : and therefore it is at least imperfect 
 in the expression. For it is left undecided, whether it 
 means the abstract Identity of understanding, — abstract, 
 that is, because contrasted with the other characteristics 
 of Essence, or the Identity which is inherently concrete. 
 In the latter case, as will be seen, true Identity is first 
 discoverable in the Ground, and, with a higher truth, in 
 the Notion. — Even the word Absolute is often used to 
 mean no more than 'abstract.' Absolute space and 
 absolute time, for example, is another way of saying 
 abstract space and abstract time. 
 
 When the principles of Essence are taken as essen- 
 tial principles of thought they become predicates of 
 a presupposed subject, which, because they are essen- 
 tial, is ' Everything.' The propositions thus arising 
 have been stated as universal LawS of Thought. Thus 
 the first of them, the maxim of Identity, reads : Every- 
 thing is identical with itself, A=A: and, negatively, A 
 cannot at the same time be A and not A. — This maxim, 
 instead of being a true law of thought, is nothing but 
 the law of abstract understanding. The propositional 
 form itself contradicts it : for a proposition always pro- 
 
214 ^^^ DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [115. 
 
 mises a distinction between subject and predicate ; while 
 the present one does not fulfil what its form requires. 
 But the Law is particularly set aside by the following 
 so-called Laws of Thought, which make laws out of its 
 opposite.— It is asserted that the maxim of Identity, 
 though it cannot be proved, regulates the procedure of 
 every consciousness, and that experience shows it to be 
 accepted as soon as its terms are apprehended. To 
 this alleged experience of the logic-books may be op- 
 posed the universal experience that no mind thinks or 
 forms conceptions or speaks, in accordance with this 
 law, and that no existence of any kind whatever con- 
 forms to it. Utterances after the fashion of this pre- 
 tended law (A planet is— a planet; Magnetism is — 
 magnetism ; Mind is — mind) are, as they deserve to be, 
 reputed silly. That is certainly matter of general ex- 
 perience. The logic which seriously propounds such 
 laws and the scholastic world in which alone they are 
 valid have long been discredited with practical common 
 sense as well as with the philosophy of reason. 
 
 Identity is, in the first place, the repetition of what we 
 had earlier as Being, but as become, through supersession of 
 its character of immediateness. It is therefore Being as 
 Ideality.— It is important to come to a proper understanding 
 on the true meaning of Identity : and, for that purpose, we 
 must especially guard against taking it as abstract Identity, 
 to the exclusion of all Difference. That is the touch-stone 
 for distinguishing all bad philosophy from what alone 
 deserves the name of philosophy. Identity in its truth, as 
 an Ideality of what immediately is, is a high category for our 
 religious modes of mind as well as all other forms of thought 
 and mental activity. The true knowledge of God, it may be 
 said, begins when we know Him as identity, — as absolute 
 identity. To know so much is to see that all the power and 
 glory of the world sinks into nothing in God's presence, 
 and subsists only as the reflection of His power and His 
 
115-116.] IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE. 215 
 
 glory. In the same way, Identity, as self-consciousness, is 
 what dis^jngi\ishes man from nature, particularly from the 
 brutes which never reach the point of comprehending 
 themselves as ' I,' that is, pure self-contained unity. So 
 again, in connexion with thought, the main thing is not to 
 confuse the true Identity, which contains Being and its 
 characteristics ideally transfigured in it, with an abstract 
 Identity, identity of bare form. All the charges of narrow- 
 ness, hardness, meaninglessness, which are so often directed 
 against thought from the quarter of feeling and immediate 
 perception, rest on the perverse assumption that thought 
 acts only as a faculty of abstract Identification. The Formal 
 Logic itself confirms this assumption by laying down the 
 supreme law of thought (so-called) which has been discussed 
 above. If thinking were no more than an abstract Identity, 
 we could not but own it to be a most futile and tedious 
 business. No doubt the notion, and the idea too, are iden- 
 tical with themselves : but identical only in so far as they 
 at the same time involve distinction. 
 
 [S) Difference. 
 
 116.] Essence is mere Identity and reflection in itself 
 only as it is self-relating negativity, and in that way 
 self-repulsion. It contains therefore essentially the 
 characteristic of Difference. 
 
 Other-being is here no longer qualitative, taking the 
 shape of the character or limit. It is now in Essence, 
 in self-relating essence, and therefore the negation is at 
 the same time a relation, — is, in short, Distinction, Re- 
 lativity, Mediation. 
 
 To ask, ' How Identity comes to Difference,' assumes 
 that Identity as mere abstract Identity is something of 
 itself, and Difference also something else equally inde- 
 pendent. This supposition renders an answer to the 
 question impossible. If Identity is viewed as diverse from 
 Difference, all that we have in this way is but Difference ; 
 and hence we cannot demonstrate the advance to difference, 
 because the person who asks for the How of the progress 
 
2l6 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [116-117. 
 
 thereby implies that for him the starting-point is non- 
 existent. The question then when put to the test has 
 obviously no meaning, and its proposer may be met with 
 the question what he means by Identity ; whereupon we 
 should soon see that he attaches no idea to it at all, and 
 that Identity is for him an empty name. As we have seen, 
 besides, Identity is undoubtedly a negative, — not however an 
 abstract empty Nought, but the negation of Being and its 
 characteristics. Being so. Identity is at the same time self- 
 relation, and, what is more, negative self-relation ; in other 
 words, it draws a distinction between it and itself. 
 
 117.] Difference is, first of all, (i) immediate differ- 
 ence, i. e. Diversity or Variety. In Diversity the dif- 
 ferent things are each individually what they are, and 
 unaffected by the relation in which they stand to each 
 other. This relation is therefore external to them. In 
 consequence of the various things being thus indifferent 
 to the difference between them, it falls outside them into 
 a third thing, the agent of Comparison. This external 
 difference, as an identity of the objects related, is Like- 
 ness; as a non-identity of them, is Unlikeness. 
 
 The gap wiiich understanding allows to divide these 
 characteristics, is so great, that although comparison 
 has one and the same substratum for likeness and un- 
 likeness, which are explained to be different aspects and 
 points of view in it, still likeness by itself is the first of 
 the elements alone, viz. identity, and unlikeness by itself 
 is difference. 
 
 Diversity has, like Identity, been transformed into a 
 maxim: 'Everything is various or different': or, 'There 
 are no two things completely like each other.' Here 
 Everything is put under a predicate, which is the re- 
 verse of the identity attributed to it in the first maxim ; 
 and therefore under a law contradicting the first. How- 
 ever there is an explanation. As the diversity is sup- 
 posed due only to external comparison, anything taken 
 
117.] ^^^^ ^^^ UNLIKE. 217 
 
 per se is expected and understood always to be identical 
 with itself, so that the second law need not interfere 
 with the first. But, in that case, variety does not belong 
 to the something or everything in question : it constitutes 
 no intrinsic characteristic of the subject: and the second 
 maxim on this showing does not admit of being stated at 
 all. If, on the other hand, the something itself \s. as the 
 maxim says diverse, it must be in virtue of its own proper 
 character: but in this case the specific difference, and 
 not variety as such, is what is intended. And this is 
 the meaning of the maxim of Leibnitz. 
 
 When understanding sets itself to study Identity, it has 
 already passed beyond it, and is looking at Difference in the 
 shape of bare Variety. If we follow the so-called law of 
 Identity, and say,— The sea is the sea, The air is the air, 
 The moon is the moon, these objects pass for having no 
 bearing on one another. What we have before us therefore 
 is not Identity, but Difference. We do not stop at this 
 point however, or regard things merely as different. We 
 compare them one with another, and thus discover the 
 features of likeness and unlikeness. The work of the finite 
 sciences lies to a great extent in the application of these 
 categories, and the phrase 'scientific treatment' generally 
 means no more than the method which has for its aim com- 
 parison of the objects under examination. This method has 
 undoubtedly led to some important results ;— we may par- 
 ticularly mention the great advance of modern times in the 
 provinces of comparative anatomy and comparative lin- 
 guistic. But it is going too far to suppose that the compara- 
 tive method can be employed with equal success in all 
 branches of knowledge. Nor— and this must be emphasised 
 — can mere comparison ever ultimately satisfy the require- 
 ments of science. Its results are indeed indispensable, but 
 they are still labours only preliminary to truly intelligent 
 cognition. 
 
 If it be the office of comparison to reduce existing differ- 
 ences to Identity, the science, which most perfectly fulfils 
 that end, is mathematics. The reason of that is, that quan- 
 
2l8 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [i 17-118. 
 
 titative difference is only the difference which is quite ex- 
 ternal. Thus, in geometry, a triangle and a quadrangle, 
 figures qualitatively different, have this qualitative difference 
 discounted by abstraction, and are equalised to one another 
 in magnitude. It follows from Vv^hat.has been formerly said 
 about the mere Identity of understanding that, as has also 
 been pointed out (§ 99, note), neither philosophy nor the 
 empirical sciences need envy this superiority of Mathe- 
 matics. 
 
 The story is told that, when Leibnitz propounded the 
 maxim of Variety, the cavaliers and ladies of the court, as 
 they walked round the garden, made efforts to discover two 
 leaves indistinguishable from each other, in order to confute 
 the law stated by the philosopher. Their device was un- 
 questionably a convenient method of dealing with meta- 
 physics,— one which has not ceased to be fashionable. All 
 the same, as regards the principle of Leibnitz, difference 
 must be understood to mean not an external and indifferent 
 diversity merely, but difference essential. Hence the very 
 nature of things implies that they must be different. 
 
 118.] Likeness is an Identity only of those things 
 which are not the same, not identical with each other : 
 and Unlikeness is a relation of things unlike. The two 
 therefore do not fall on different aspects or points of 
 view in the thing, without any mutual affinity : but one 
 throws light into the other. Variety thus comes to be 
 reflexive difference, or difference (distinction) implicit 
 and essential, determinate or specific difference. 
 
 While things merely various show themselves unaffected 
 by each other, likeness and unlikeness on the contrary are 
 a pair of characteristics which are in completely reciprocal 
 relation. The one of them cannot be thought without the 
 other. This advance from simple variety to opposition ap- 
 pears in our common acts of thought, when we allow that 
 comparison has a meaning only upon the hypothesis of 
 an existing difference, and that on the other hand we can 
 distinguish only on the hypothesis of existing similarity. 
 
1 18-119.] SPECIFIC DIFFERENCE. 219 
 
 Hence, if the problem be the discovery of a difference, we 
 attribute no great cleverness to the man who only distin- 
 guishes those objects, of which the difference is palpable, 
 e.g. a pen and a camel: and similarly, it implies no very 
 advanced faculty of comparison, when the objects compared, 
 e.g. a beech and an oak, a temple and a church, are near 
 akin. In the case of difference, in short, we like to see 
 identity, and in the case of identity we like to see difference. 
 Within the range of the empirical sciences however, the one 
 of these two categories is often allowed to put the other out 
 of sight and mind. Thus the scientific problem at one time 
 is to reduce existing differences to identity; on another 
 occasion, with equal one-sidedness, to discover new differ- 
 ences. We see this especially in physical science. There 
 the problem consists, in the first place, in the continual 
 search for new 'elements,' new forces, new genera, and 
 species. Or, in another direction, it seeks to show that all 
 bodies hitherto believed to be simple are compound : and 
 modern physicists and chemists smile at the ancients, who 
 were satisfied with four elements, and these not simple. 
 Secondly, and on the other hand, mere identity is made the 
 chief question. Thus electricity and chemical affinity are 
 regarded as the same, and even the organic processes of 
 digestion and assimilation are looked upon as a mere ghemical 
 operation. Modern philosophy has often been nicknamed 
 the Philosophy of Identity. But, as was already remarked 
 (§ 103, note), it is precisely philosophy, and in particular 
 speculative logic, which lays bare the nothingness of the 
 abstract, undifferentiated identity, known to understanding ; 
 though it also undoubtedly urges its disciples not to rest 
 at mere diversity, but to ascertain the inner unity of all 
 existence. 
 
 119.] Difference implicit is essential difference, the 
 Positive and the Negative : and that is this way. The 
 Positive is the identical self-relation in such a way as 
 not to be the Negative, and the Negative is the different 
 by itself so as not to' be the Positive. Thus either has 
 an existence of its own in proportion as it is not the 
 
220 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [119. 
 
 Other. The one is made visible in the other, and is only 
 in so far as that other is. Essential difference is there- 
 fore Opposition ; according to which the different is not 
 confronted by any other but by its other. That is, either 
 of these two (Positive and Negative) is stamped with a 
 characteristic of its own only in its relation to the other : 
 the one is only reflected into itself as it is reflected into 
 the other. And so with the other. Either in this way 
 is the other's own other. 
 
 Difference implicit or essential gives the maxim. 
 Everything is essentially distinct ; or, as it has also 
 been expressed, Of two opposite predicates the one 
 only can be assigned to anything, and there is no third 
 possible. This maxim of Contrast or Opposition most 
 expressly controverts the maxim of Identity : the one 
 says a thing should be only self-relation, the other says 
 that it must be an opposite, a relation to its other. The 
 native unintelligence of abstraction betrays itself by 
 setting in juxtaposition two contrary maxims, like these, 
 as laws, without even so much as comparing them. — 
 The Maxim of Excluded Middle is the maxim of the 
 definite understanding, which would fain avoid contra- 
 diction, but in so doing falls into it. A must be either 
 + A or — A, it says. It virtually declares in these 
 words a third A which is neither + nor — , and which 
 at the same time is yet invested with + and — characters. 
 If + W mean 6 miles to the West, and — W mean 
 6 miles to the East, and if the -f and — cancel each 
 other, the 6 miles of way or space remain what they 
 were with and without the contrast. Even the mere 
 plus and minus of number or abstract direction have, if 
 we like, zero, for their third : but it need not be denied 
 that the empty contrast, which understanding institutes 
 between plus and minus, is not without its value in such 
 abstractions as number, direction, &c. 
 
119.] POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE. 221 
 
 In the doctrine of contradictory concepts, the one 
 notion is, say, blue (for in this doctrine even the 
 sensuous generalised image of a colour is called a 
 notion) and the other not-blue. This other then would 
 not be an affirmative, say, yellow, but would merely be 
 kept at the abstract negative. — That the Negative in its 
 own nature is quite as much Positive (see next §), is 
 implied in saying that what is opposite to another is its 
 other. The inanity of the opposition between what are 
 called contradictory notions is fully exhibited in what we 
 may call the grandiose formula of a general law, that 
 Everything has the one and not the other of all predi- 
 cates which are in such opposition. In this way, mind 
 is either white or not-white, yellow or not-yellow, &c., 
 ad mfinitum. 
 
 It was forgotten that Identity and Opposition are 
 themselves opposed, and the maxim of Opposition was 
 taken even for that of Identity, in the shape of the 
 principle of Contradiction. A notion, which possesses 
 neither or both of two mutually contradictory marks, 
 e.g. a quadrangular circle, is held to be logically false. 
 Now though a multangular circle and a rectilineal arc 
 no less contradict this maxim, geometers never hesitate 
 to treat the circle as. a polygon with rectilineal sides. 
 But anything like a circle (that is to say its mere character 
 or nominal definition) is still no notion. In the notion of 
 a circle, centre and circumference are equally essen- 
 tial ; both marks belong to it : and yet centre and 
 circumference are opposite and contradictory to each 
 other. 
 
 The conception of Polarity, which is so dominant in 
 physics, contains by implication the more correct defini- 
 tion of Opposition. But physics for its theory of the 
 laws of thought adheres to the ordinary logic ; it might 
 therefore well be horrified in case it should ever work 
 
222 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [119. 
 
 out the conception of Polarity, and get at the thoughts 
 which are impHed in it. 
 
 (i) With the positive we return to identity, but in its 
 higher truth as identical self-relation, and at the same time 
 with the note that it is not the negative. The negative 
 per se is the same as difference itself The identical as such 
 is primarily the yet uncharacterised : the positive on the 
 other hand is what is self-identical, but with the mark of 
 antithesis to an other. And the negative is difference as 
 such, characterised as not identity. This is the diflFerence 
 of difference within its own self 
 
 Positive and negative are supposed to express an absolute 
 difference. The two however are at bottom the same : the 
 name of either might be transferred to the other. Thus, for 
 example, debts and assets are not two particular, self-sub- 
 sisting species of property. What is negative to the debtor, 
 is positive to the creditor. A way to the east is also a way 
 to the west. Positive and negative are therefore intrinsically 
 conditioned by one another, and are only in relation to each 
 other. The north pole of the magnet cannot be without the 
 south pole, and vice versa. If we cut a magnet in two, we 
 have not a north pole in one piece, and a south pole in the 
 other. Similarly, in electricity, the positive and the negative 
 are not two diverse and independent fluids. In opposition, 
 the different is not confronted by any other, but by its other. 
 Usually we regard different things as unaffected by each 
 other. Thus we say : I am a human being, and around me 
 are air, water, animals, and all sorts of things. Everything 
 is thus put outside of every other. But the aim of philo- 
 sophy is to banish indifference, and to ascertain the neces- 
 sity of things. By that means the other is seen to stand 
 over against its other. Thus, for example, inorganic nature 
 is not to be considered merely something else than organic 
 nature, but the necessary antithesis of it. Both are in 
 essential relation to one another ; and the one of the two is, 
 only in so far as it excludes the other from it, and thus 
 relates itself thereto. Nature in like manner is not without 
 mind, nor mind without nature. An important step has 
 been taken, when we cease in thinking to use phrases hke ; 
 
II9-I20.] LAIV OF EXCLUDED MIDDLE. 223 
 
 Of course something else is also possible. While we so 
 speak, we are still tainted with contingency : and all true 
 thinking, we have already said, is a thinking of necessity. 
 
 In modern physical science the opposition, first observed 
 to exist in magnetism as polarity, has come to be regarded 
 as a universal law pervading the whole of nature. This 
 would be a real scientific advance, if care were at the same 
 time taken not to let mere variety revert without explana- 
 tion, as a valid category, side by side with opposition. Thus 
 at one time the colours are regarded as in polar opposition 
 to one another, and called complementary colours ; at an- 
 other time they are looked at in their indifferent and merely 
 quantitative difference of red, yellow, green, &;c. 
 
 (2) Instead of speaking by the maxim of Excluded Middle 
 (which is the maxim of abstract understanding) we should 
 rather say : Everything is opposite. Neither in heaven nor 
 in earth, neither in the world of mind nor of nature, is there 
 anywhere such an abstract 'Either — or' as the understand- 
 ing maintains. Whatever exists is concrete, with difference 
 and opposition in itself The finitude of things will then lie in 
 the want of correspondence between their immediate being, 
 and what they essentially are. Thus, in inorganic nature, 
 the acid is implicitly at the same time the base : in other 
 words, its only being consists in its relation to its other. 
 Hence also the acid is not something that persists quietly in 
 the contrast : it is always in effort to realise what it poten- 
 tially is. Contradiction is the very moving principle of the 
 world: and it is ridiculous to say that contradiction is. un- 
 thinkable. The only thing correct in that statement is that 
 contradiction js not the end of the matter, but cancels itself. 
 But contradiction, when cancelled, does not leave abstract 
 identity ; for that is itself only one side of the contrariety. 
 The proximate result of opposition (when realised as con- 
 tradiction) is the Ground, which contains identity as well as 
 difference superseded and deposed to elements in the com- 
 pleter notion. 
 
 120.] Contrariety then has two forms. The Positive 
 is the aforesaid various (different) which is understood 
 to be independent, and yet at the same not to be 
 
224 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [120-121. 
 
 unaffected by its relation to its other. The Negative is 
 to be, no less independently, negative self-relating, self- 
 subsistent, and yet at the same time as Negative must 
 on every point have this its self-relation, i.e. its Positive, 
 only in the other. Both Positive and Negative are 
 therefore explicit contradiction ; both are potentially 
 the same. Both are so actually also ; since either is the 
 abrogation of the other and of itself. Thus they fall to 
 the Ground. — Or as is plain, the essential difference, as 
 a difference, is only the difference of it from itself, and 
 thus contains the identical : so that to essential and 
 actual difference there belongs itself as well as iden- 
 tity. As self-relating difference it is likewise virtually 
 enunciated as the self-identical. And the opposite is in 
 general that which includes the one and its other, itself 
 and its opposite. The immanence of essence thus de- 
 fined is the Ground. 
 
 (y) The Ground. 
 
 121.] The Ground is the unity of identity and differ- 
 ence, the truth of what difference and identity have 
 turned out to be, — the reflection-into-self, which is 
 equally a reflection-into-an-other, and vice versa. It is 
 essence put explicitly as a totality. 
 
 The maxim of the Ground runs thus : Everything has 
 its Sufficient Ground : that is, the true essentiality of 
 any thing is not the predication of it as identical with 
 itself, or as different (various), or merely positive, or 
 merely negative, but as having its Being in an other, 
 which, being its self-same, is its essence. And to this 
 extent the essence is not abstract reflection into self, but 
 into an other. The Ground is the essence in its own 
 inwardness ; the essence is intrinsically a ground ; and 
 it is a ground only when it is a ground of somewhat, of 
 an other. 
 
lai.] GROUND AND CONSEQUENCE. 225 
 
 We must be careful, when we say that the ground is the 
 unity of identity and difference, not to understand by this 
 unity an abstract identity. Otherwise we only change the 
 name, while we still think the identity (of understanding) 
 already seen to be false. To avoid this misconception we 
 may say that the ground, besides being the unity, is also 
 the difference of identity and difference. In that case in the 
 ground, which promised at first to supersede contradiction, a 
 new contradiction seems to arise. It is however a contra- 
 diction which, so far from persisting quietly in itself, is 
 rather the expulsion of it from itself. The ground is a 
 ground only to the extent that it affords ground : but the 
 result which thus issued from the ground is only itself. In 
 this lies its formalism. The ground and what is grounded 
 are one and the same content : the difference between the 
 two is the mere difference of form which separates simple 
 self-relation^ on the one hand, from mediation or derivative- 
 ness on the othen Inquiry into the grounds of things goes 
 with the pointof view which, as already noted (note to § 112), 
 is adopted by Reflection. We wish, as it were, to see the 
 matter double, first in its immediacy, and secondly in its 
 ground, where it is no longer immediate. This is the plain 
 meaning of the law of sufficient ground, as it is called ; it 
 asserts that things should essentially be viewed as mediated. 
 The manner in which Formal Logic establishes this law of 
 thought, sets a bad example to other sciences. Formal 
 Logic asks these sciences not to accept their subject-matter 
 as it is immediately given ; and yet herself lays down a law 
 of thought without deducing it,— in other words, without 
 exhibiting its mediation. With the same justice as the 
 logician maintains our faculty of thought to be so consti- 
 tuted that we must ask for the ground of everything, might 
 the physicist, when asked why a man who falls into water is 
 drowned, reply that man happens to be so organised that he 
 cannot live under water; or the jurist, when asked why a 
 criminal is punished, reply that civil society happens to be 
 so constituted that crimes cannot be left unpunished. 
 
 Yet even if logic be excused the duty of giving a ground 
 for the law of the sufficient ground, it might at least explain 
 
 VOL. II. Q 
 
226 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [121. 
 
 what is to be understood by a ground. The common ex- 
 planation, which describes the ground as what has a conse- 
 quence, seems at the first glance more lucid and intelligible 
 than the preceding definition in logical terms. If you ask 
 however what the consequence is, you are told that it is 
 what has a ground ; and it becomes obvious that the expla- 
 nation is intelligible only because it assumes what in our 
 case has been reached as the termination of an antecedent 
 movement of thought. And this is the true business of 
 logic : to show that those thoughts, which as usually em- 
 ployed merely float before consciousness neither understood 
 nor demonstrated, are really grades in the self-determination 
 of thought. It is by this means that they are understood and 
 demonstrated. 
 
 In common life, and it is the same in the finite sciences, 
 this reflective form is often employed as a key to the secret 
 of the real condition of the objects under investigation. So 
 long as we deal with what may be termed the household 
 needs of knowledge, nothing can be urged against this method 
 of study. But it can never afford definitive satisfaction, 
 either in theory or practice. And the reason why it fails is 
 that the ground is yet without a definite content of its own ; 
 so that to regard anything as resting upon a ground merely 
 gives the formal difference of mediation in place of imme- 
 diacy. We see an electrical phenomenon, for example, and 
 we ask for its ground (or reason) : we are told that electricity 
 is the ground of this phenomenon. What is this but the 
 same content as we had immediately before us, only trans- 
 lated into the form of inwardness ? 
 
 The ground however is not merely simple self-identity, 
 but also different : hence various grounds may be alleged 
 for the same sum of fact. This variety of grounds, again, 
 following the logic of difference, culminates in opposition of 
 grounds pro and contra. In any action, such as a theft, there 
 is a sum of fact in which several aspects may be distin- 
 guished. The theft has violated the rights of property : it 
 has given the means of satisfying his wants to the needy 
 thief: possibly too the man, from whom the theft was made, 
 misused his property. The violation of property is unques- 
 
121.] THE SUFFICIENT REASON. 227 
 
 tionably the decisive point of view before wliich the others 
 must give way : but the bare law of the ground cannot settle 
 that question. Usually indeed the law is interpreted to 
 speak of a sufficient ground, not of any ground whatever : 
 and it might be supposed therefore, in the action referred 
 to, that, although other points of view besides the violation 
 of property might be held as grounds, yet they would not be 
 sufficient grounds. But here comes a dilemma. If we use 
 the phrase * sufficient ground,' the epithet is either otiose, 
 or of such a kind as to carry us past the mere category 
 of ground. The predicate is otiose and tautological, if it 
 only states the capability of giving a ground or reason : for 
 the ground is a ground, only in so far as it has this capa- 
 bility. If a soldier runs away from battle to save his life, his 
 conduct is certainly a violation of duty : but it cannot be 
 held that the ground which led him so to act was insuffi- 
 cient, otherwise he would have remained at his post. Be- 
 sides, there is this also to be said. On one hand any ground 
 suffices : on the other no ground suffices as mere ground ; 
 because, as already said, it is yet void of a content objec- 
 tively and intrinsically determined, and is therefore not self- 
 acting and productive. A content thus objectively and 
 intrinsically determined, and hence self-acting, will herealter 
 come before us as the notion : and it is the notion which 
 Leibnitz had in his eye when he spoke of sufficient ground, 
 and urged the study of things under its point of view. His 
 remarks were originally directed against that merely me- 
 chanical method of conceiving things so much in vogue 
 even now; a method which he justly pronounces insufficient. 
 We may see an instance of this mechanical theory of inves- 
 tigation, when the organic process of the circulation of the 
 blood is traced back merely to the contraction of the heart ; 
 or when certain theories of criminal law explain the pur- 
 pose of punishment to lie in deterring people from crime, in 
 rendering the criminal harmless, or in other extraneous 
 grounds of the same kind. It is unfair to Leibnitz to sup- 
 pose that he was content with anything so poor as this 
 formal law of the ground. The method of investigation 
 which he inaugurated is the verj' reverse of a formalism 
 Q 2 
 
228 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [121. 
 
 which acquiesces in mere grounds, where a full and concrete 
 knowledge is sought. Considerations to this effect led Leib- 
 nitz to contrast causae efficientes and causae Jinales, and to 
 insist on the place of final causes as the conception to which 
 the efficient were to lead up. If we adopt this distinction, 
 light, heat, and moisture would be the causae efficientes, not 
 the causa finalis of the growth of plants : the causa finalis is 
 the notion of the plant itself. 
 
 To get no further than mere grounds, especially on ques- 
 tions of law and morality, is the position and principle of the 
 Sophists. Sophistry, as we ordinarily conceive it, is a 
 method of investigation which aims at distorting what is 
 just and true, and exhibiting things in a false light. Such 
 however is not the proper or primary tendency of Sophistry : 
 the standpoint of which is no other than that of 'Raisonne- 
 ment.' The Sophists came on the scene at a time when the 
 Greeks had begun to grow dissatisfied with mere authority 
 and tradition and felt the need of intellectual justification for 
 what they were to accept as obligatory. That desideratum 
 the Sophists supplied by teaching their countrymen to seek 
 for the various points of view under which things may be 
 considered: which points of view are the same as grounds. 
 But the ground, as we have seen, has no essential and 
 objective principles of its own, and it is as easy to discover 
 grounds for what is wrong and immoral as for what is moral 
 and right. Upon the observer therefore it depends to decide 
 what points are to have most weight. The decision in such 
 circumstances is prompted by his individual views and sen- 
 timents. Thus the objective foundation of what ought to 
 have been of absolute and essential obligation, accepted by 
 all, was undermined : and Sophistry by this destructive 
 action deservedly brought upon itself the bad name pre- 
 viously mentioned. Socrates, as we all know, met the 
 Sophists at every point, not by a bare re-assertion of autho- 
 rity and tradition against their argumentations, but by show- 
 ing dialectically how untenable the mere grounds were, and 
 by vindicating the obligation of justice and goodness,— by re- 
 instating the universal or notion of the will. In the present 
 day such a method of argumentation is not quite out of fashion. 
 
121-122.] THE SUFFICIENT REASON. 229 
 
 Nor is that the case only in the discussion of secular matters. 
 It occurs even in sermons, such as those where every pos- 
 sible ground of gratitude to God is propounded. To such 
 pleading Socrates and Plato would not have scrupled to 
 apply the name of Sophistry. For Sophistr\' has nothing 
 to do with what is taught :— that may very possibly be true. 
 Sophistry lies in the formal circumstance of teaching it by 
 grounds which are as available for attack as for defence. 
 In a time so rich in reflection and so devoted to raisonm- 
 ment as our own, he must be a poor creature who cannot 
 advance a good ground for everything, even for what is 
 worst and most depraved. Everything in the world that 
 has become corrupt has had good ground for its corruption. 
 An appeal to grounds at first makes the hearer think of 
 beating a retreat : but when experience has taught him the 
 real state of these matters, he closes his ears against them, 
 and refuses to be imposed upon any more. 
 
 122.] As it first comes, the chief feature of Essence is 
 show in itself and intermediation in itself. But when it 
 has completed the circle of intermediation, its unity with 
 itself is expHcitly put as the self-annulling of difference, 
 and therefore of intermediation. Once more then we 
 come back to immediacy or Being, — but Being in so far 
 as it is intermediated by annulling the intermediation. 
 And that Being is Existence. 
 
 The ground is not yet determined by objective prin- 
 ciples of its own, nor is it an end or final cause : hence 
 it is not active, nor productive. An Existence only 
 proceeds from the ground. The determinate ground is 
 therefore a formal matter : that is to say, any point will 
 do, so long as it is expressly put as self-relation, as 
 affirmation, in correlation with the immediate existence 
 depending on it. If it be a ground at all, it is a good 
 ground: for the term 'good' is employed abstractly as 
 equivalent to affirmative ; and any point (or feature) is 
 good which can in any way be enunciated as confessedly 
 
23© THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [122-123. 
 
 affirmative. So it happens that a ground can be found 
 and adduced for everything : and a good ground (for 
 example, a good motive for action) may effect some- 
 thing or may not, it may have a consequence or it may 
 not. It becomes a motive (strictly so called) and effects 
 something, e.g. through its reception into a will; there 
 and there only it becomes active and is made a cause. 
 
 {b) Existence. 
 
 123.] Existence is the immediate unity of reflection- 
 into-self and reflection-into-another. It follows from 
 this that existence is the indefinite multitude of existents 
 as reflected-into-themselves, which at the same time 
 equally throw light upon one another, — which, in short, 
 are co-relative, and form a world of reciprocal depend- 
 ence and of infinite interconnexion between grounds and 
 consequents. The grounds are themselves existences : 
 and the existents in like manner are in many directions 
 grounds as well as consequents. 
 
 The phrase ' Existence ' (derived from existere) suggests 
 the fact of having proceeded from something. Existence is 
 Being which has proceeded from the ground, and been 
 reinstated by annulling its intermediation. The Essence, as 
 Being set aside and absorbed, originally came before us as 
 shining, or showing in self, and the categories of this re- 
 flection are identity, difference and ground. The last is the 
 unity of identity and difference.; and because it unifies them 
 it has at the same time to distinguish itself from itself. But 
 that which is in this way distinguished from the ground is 
 as little mere difference, as the ground itself is abstract same- 
 ness. The ground works its own suspension : and when 
 suspended, the result of its negation is existence. Having 
 issued from the ground, existence contains the ground in it 
 the ground ooes not remain, as it were, behind existence, 
 but by its very nature supersedes itself and translates itself 
 into existence. This is exemplified even in our ordinary 
 
133-134.] EXISTENCE. 23I 
 
 mode of thinking, when we look upon the ground of a thing, 
 not as something abstractly inward, but as itself also an 
 existent. For example, the lightning-flash which has set a 
 house on fire would be considered the ground of the con- 
 flagration : or the manners of a nation and the condition of 
 its life would be regarded as the ground of its constitution. 
 Such indeed is the ordinary aspect in which the existent 
 world originally appears to reflection, — an indefinite crowd 
 "of things existent, which being simultaneously reflected on 
 themselves and on one another are related reciprocally as 
 ground and consequence. In this motley play of the world, 
 if we may so call the sum of existents, there is nowhere 
 a firm footing to be found : everything bears an aspect of 
 relativity, conditioned by and conditioning something else. 
 The reflective understanding makes it its business to elicit 
 and trace these connexions running out in every dii ection ; 
 but the question touching an ultimate design is so far left un- 
 answered, and therefore the craving of the reason after 
 knowledge passes with the further development of the 
 logical Idea beyond this position of mere relativity. 
 
 124.] The reflection-on-another of the existent is 
 however inseparable from the reflection-on-se.lf : the 
 ground is their unity, from which existence has issued. 
 The existent therefore includes relativity, and has on 
 its own part its multiple interconnexions with other 
 existents : it is reflected on itself as its ground. The 
 existent is, when so described, a Thing, 
 
 The ' thing-by-itself ' (or thing in the abstract), so 
 famous in the philosophy of Kant, shows itself here in 
 its genesis. It is seen to be the abstract reflection-on- 
 self, which is clung to, to the exclusion of reflection-on- 
 other-things and of all predication of difference. The 
 thing-by-itself therefore is the empty substratum for these 
 predicates of relation. 
 
 If to know means to comprehend an object in its concrete 
 character, then the thing-by-itself, which is nothing but the 
 quite abstract and indeterminate thing in general, must 
 
S32 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [124-125. 
 
 certainly be as unknowable as it is alleged to be. With as 
 much reason however as we speak of the thing-by-itself, 
 we might speak of quality-by-itself or quantity-by-itself, and 
 of any other category. The expression would then serve to 
 signify that these categories are taken in their abstract 
 immediacy, apart from their development and inward 
 character. It is no better than a whim of the understanding, 
 therefore, if we attach the qualificatory 'in or by-itself to 
 the thing only. But this ' in or by-itself is also applied to 
 the facts of the mental as well as the natural world : as we 
 speak of electricity or of a plant in itself, so we speak of 
 man or the state in itself. By this ' in-itself ' in these objects 
 we are meant to understand what they strictly and properly 
 are. This usage is liable to the same criticism as the phrase 
 ' thing-in-itself.' For if we stick to the mere ' in-itself ' of an 
 object, we apprehend it not in its truth, but in the inadequate 
 form of mere abstraction. Thus the man, by or in himself, 
 is the child. And what the child has to do is to rise out of 
 this abstract and undeveloped ' in-himself,' and become * for 
 himself what he is at first only ' in-himself,' — a free and 
 reasonable being. Similarly, the state-in-itself is the yet im- 
 mature and patriarchal state, where the various political 
 functions, latent in the notion of the state, have not received 
 the full logical constitution which the logic of political princi- 
 ples demands. In the same sense, the germ may be called 
 the plant-in-itself. These examples may show the mistake 
 of supposing that the 'thing-in-itself or the 'in-itself of 
 things is something inaccessible to our cognition. All 
 things are originally in-themselves, but that is not the end 
 of the matter. As the germ, being the plant-in-itself, means 
 self-development, so the thing in general passes beyond its 
 in-itself, (the abstract reflection on self,) to manifest itself 
 further as a reflection on other things. It is in this sense 
 that it has properties. 
 
 {c) The Thing. 
 125.] («) The Thing is the totality— the development 
 in expHcit unity — of the categories of the ground and 
 of existence. On the side of one of its factors, viz. 
 
125.] TH^ THING AND ITS PROPERTIES. 233 
 
 reflection-on-other-things, it has in it the differences, in 
 virtue of which it is a characterised and concrete thing. 
 These characteristics are different from one another ; 
 theyliave their reflection-into-self not on their own part, 
 but on the part of the thing. They are Properties of 
 the thing : and their relation to the thing is expressed 
 by the word ' have.' 
 
 As a term of relation, ' to have ' takes the place of ' to 
 be.' True, somewhat has qualities on its part too : but 
 this transference of 'Having' into the sphere of Being 
 is inexact, because the character as quality is directly 
 one with the somewhat, and the somewhat ceases to be 
 when it loses its quality. But the thing is reflection- 
 into-self: for it is an identity which is also distinct from 
 the difference, i.e. from its attributes. — Pn many lan- 
 guages 'have' is employed to denote past time. And 
 with reason : for the past is absorbed or suspended 
 being, and the mind is its reflection-into-self; in the 
 mind only it continues to subsist, — the mind however 
 distinguishing from itself this being in it which has 
 been absorbed or suspended. 
 
 In the Thing all the characteristics of reflection recur as 
 existent. Thus the thing, in its initial aspect, as the thing- 
 by-itself, is the self-same or identical. But identity, it was 
 proved, is not found without difference : so the properties, 
 which the thing has, are the existent difference in the form 
 of diversity. In the case of diversity or variety each diverse 
 member exhibited an indifference to every other, and they 
 had no other relation to each other, save what was given by 
 a comparison external to them. But now in the thing we 
 have a bond which keeps the various properties in union. 
 Property, besides, should not be confused with quality. 
 No doubt, we also say, a thing has qualities. But the 
 phraseology is a misplaced one: 'having' hints at an in- 
 dependence, foreign to the ' Somewhat,' which is still 
 directly identical with its quality. Somewhat is what it is 
 
234 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [125-126. 
 
 only by its quality : whereas, though the thing indeed exists 
 only as it has its properties, it is not confined to this or that 
 definite property, and can therefore lose it, without ceasing- 
 to be what it is. 
 
 126.] (0) Even in the ground, however, the reflection- 
 on-something-else is directly convertible with reflection- 
 on-self. And hence the properties are not merely dif- 
 ferent from each other ; they are also self-identical, in- 
 dependent, and relieved from their attachment to the 
 thing. Still, as they are the characters of the thing 
 distinguished from one another (as reflected-into-self), 
 they are not themselves things, if things be concrete ; 
 but only existences reflected into themselves as abstract 
 characters. They are what ar€ called Matters. 
 
 Nor is the name ' things ' given to Matters, such as 
 magnetic and electric matters. They are qualities pro- 
 per, a reflected Being, — one with their Being, — they are 
 the character that has reached immediacy, existence : 
 they are ' entities.' 
 
 To elevate the properties, which the Thing has, to the in- 
 dependent position of matters, or materials of which it con- 
 sists, is a proceeding based upon the notion of a Thing : 
 and for that reason is also found in experience. Thought 
 and experience however alike protest against concluding 
 from the fact that certain properties of a thing, such as 
 colour, or smell, may be represented as particular colour- 
 ing or odorific matters, that we are then at the end of the 
 inquiry, and that nothing more is needed to penetrate to the 
 true secret of things than a disintegration of them into their 
 component materials. This disintegration into independent 
 matters is properly restricted to inorganic nature only. The 
 chemist is in the right therefore when, for example, he 
 analyses common salt or gypsum into its elements, and finds 
 that the former consists of muriatic acid and soda, the latter of 
 sulphuric acid and calcium. So too the geologist does well 
 to regard granite as a compound of quartz, felspar, and 
 mica. These matters, again, of which the thing consists, are 
 
126-137.] MATTER. 235 
 
 themselves partly things, which in that way may be once 
 more reduced to more abstract matters. Sulphuric acid, for 
 example, is a compound of sulphur and oxygen. Such 
 matters or bodies can as a matter of fact be exhibited as 
 subsisting by themselves : but frequently we find other 
 properties of things, entirely wanting this self-subsistence, 
 also regarded as particular matters. Thus we hear caloric, 
 and electrical or magnetic matters spoken of Such matters 
 are at the best figments of understanding. And we see here 
 the usual procedure of the abstract reflection of under- 
 standing. Capriciously adopting single categories, whose 
 value entirely depends on their place in the gradual evolution 
 of the logical idea, it employs them in the pretended interests 
 of explanation, but in the face of plain, unprejudiced percep- 
 tion and experience, so as to trace back to them every object 
 investigated. Nor is this all. The theory, which makes things 
 consist of independent matters, is frequently applied in a 
 region where it has neither meaning nor force. For within 
 the limits of nature Lven, wherever there is organic life, this 
 category is obviously inadequate. An animal may be said 
 to consist of bones, muscles, nerves, &c. : but evidently we 
 are here using the term 'consist' in a very different sense 
 from its use when we spoke of the piece of granite as con- 
 sisting of the above-mentioned elements. The elements of 
 granite are utterly indifferent to their combination : they 
 could subsist as well without it. The diff"erent parts and 
 members of an organic body on the contrary subsist only in 
 their union : they cease to exist as such, when they are 
 separated from each other. 
 
 127.] Thus Matter is the mere abstract or indetermi- 
 nate reflection-into-something-else, or reflection-into-self 
 at the same time as determinate ; it is consequently 
 Thinghood which then and there is, — the subsistence 
 of the thing. By this means the thing has on the part 
 of the matters its reflection-into-self (the reverse of 
 § 125) ; it subsists not on its own part, but consists of 
 the matters, and is only a superficial association between 
 them, an external combination of them. 
 
236 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [128. 
 
 128.] (y) Matter, being the immediate unity of exist- 
 ence with itself, is also indifferent towards specific 
 character. Hence the numerous diverse matters coa- 
 lesce into the one Matter, or into existence under the 
 reflective characteristic of identit3^ In contrast to this 
 one Matter these distinct properties and their external 
 relation which they have to one another in the thing, 
 constitute the Form, — the reflective category of differ- 
 ence, but a difference which exists and is a totality. 
 
 This one featureless Matter is also the same as the 
 Thing-by-itself was : only the latter is intrinsically quite 
 abstract, while the former essentially implies relation to 
 something else, and in the first place to the Form. 
 
 The various matters of which the thing consists are 
 potentially the same as one another. Thus we get one 
 Matter in general to which the difference is expressly 
 attached externally and as a bare form. This theory which 
 holds things all round to have one and the same matter at 
 bottom, and merely to differ externally in respect of form, 
 is much in vogue with the reflective understanding. Matter 
 in that case counts for naturally indeterminate, but susceptible 
 of any determination; while at the same time it is perfectly 
 permanent, and continues the same amid all change and 
 alteration. And in finite things at least this disregard of 
 matter for any determinate form is certainly exhibited. For 
 example, it matters not to a block of marble, whether it 
 receive the form of this or that statue or even the form of a 
 pillar. Be it noted however that a block of marble can disre- 
 gard form only relatively, that is, in reference to the sculptor: 
 it is by no means purely formless. And so the minera- 
 logist considers the relatively formless marble as a special 
 formation of rock, differing from other equally special form- 
 ations, such as sandstone or porphyry. Therefore we say it 
 is an abstraction of the understanding which isolates matter 
 into a certain natural formlessness. For properly speaking 
 the thought of matter includes the principle of form through- 
 out, and no formless matter therefore appears anywhere 
 
1 28-130.] MATTER AND FORM. 237 
 
 even in experience as existing. Still the conception of matter 
 as original and pre-existent, and as naturally formless, is a 
 very ancient one ; it meets us even among the Greeks, at 
 first in the mythical shape of Chaos, which is supposed to 
 represent the unformed substratum of the existing world. 
 Such a conception must of necessity tend to make God not 
 the Creator of the world, but a mere world-moulder or 
 demiurge. A deeper insight into nature reveals God as 
 creating the world out of nothing. And that teaches two 
 things. On the one hand it enunciates that matter, as such, 
 has no independent subsistence, and on the other that the 
 form does not supervene upon matter from without, but as a 
 totality involves the principle of matter in itself. This free 
 and infinite form will hereafter come before us as the 
 notion. 
 
 129.] Thus the Thing suffers a disruption into Matter 
 and Form. Each of these is the totahty of thinghood 
 and subsists for itself. But Matter, which is meant to 
 be the positive and indeterminate existence, contains, 
 as an existence, reflection-on-another, every whit as 
 much as it contains self-enclosed being. Accordingly 
 as uniting these characteristics, it is itself the totality 
 of Form. But Form, being a complete whole of char- 
 acteristics, ipso facto involves reflection-into-self; in 
 other words, as self-relating Form it has the very 
 function attributed to Matter. Both are at bottom the 
 same. Invest them with this unit}', and you have the 
 relatiori of Matter and Form, which are also no less 
 distinct. 
 
 130.] The Thing, being this totality, is a contradiction. 
 On the side of its negative unity it is Form in which 
 Matter is determined and deposed to the rank of pro- 
 perties (§ 125). At the same time it consists of Matters, 
 which in the reflection-of-the-thing-into-itself are as much 
 independent as they are at the same time negatived. 
 Thus the thing is the essential existence, in such a way 
 
238 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [130. 
 
 as to be an existence that suspends or absorbs itself in 
 itself. In other words, the thing is an Appearance or 
 Phenomenon. 
 
 The negation of the several matters, which is insisted 
 on in the thing no less than their independent existence, 
 occurs in Physics as porosity. Each of the several mat- 
 ters (colouring matter, odorific matter, and if we believe 
 some people, even sound-matter, — not excluding caloric, 
 electric matter, &c;) is also negated : and in this nega- 
 tion of theirs, or as interpenetrating their pores, we find 
 the numerous other independent matters, which, being 
 similarly porous, make room in turn for the existence 
 of the rest. Pores are not empirical facts ; they are 
 figments of the understanding, which uses them to re- 
 present the element of negation in independent matters. 
 The further working-out of the contradictions is con- 
 cealed by the nebulous imbroglio in which all matters 
 are independent and all no less negated in each other. 
 — If the faculties or activities are similarly hypostatised 
 in the mind, their living unity similarly turns to the 
 imbroglio of an action of the one on the others. 
 
 These pores (meaning thereby not the pores in an 
 organic body, such as the pores of wood or of the skin, 
 but those in the so-called 'matters,' such as colouring 
 matter, caloric, or metals, crystals, &c.) cannot be veri- 
 fied by observation. In the same way matter itself, — 
 furthermore form which is separated from matter, — 
 whether that be the thing as consisting of matters, or the 
 view that the thing itself subsists and only has proper 
 ties, — is all a product of the reflective understanding 
 which, while it observes and professes to record only 
 what it observes, is rather creating a metaphysic, brist- 
 ling with contradictions of which it is unconscious. 
 
131.] APPEARANCE. 239 
 
 B. —Appearance. 
 
 131.] The Essence must appear or shine forth. Its 
 shining or reflection in it is the suspension and trans- 
 lation of it to immediacy, which, whilst as reflection- 
 on-self it is matter or subsistence, is also form, reflec- 
 tion-on-something-else, a subsistence which sets itself 
 aside. To show or shine is the characteristic by which 
 essence is distinguished from being, — by which it is 
 essence ; and it is this show which, when it is developed, 
 shows itself, and is Appearance. Essence accord- 
 ingly is not something beyond or behind appearance, 
 but just because it is the essence which exists — the 
 existence is Appearance (Forth-shining). 
 
 Existence stated explicitly in its contradiction is Appear- 
 ance. But appearance (forth-shining) is not to be confused 
 with a mere show (shining). Show is the proximate truth 
 of Being or immediacy. The immediate, instead of being, 
 as we suppose, something independent, resting on its 
 own self, is a mere show, and as such it is packed or 
 summed up under the simplicity of the immanent essence. 
 The essence is, in the first place, the sum total of the show- 
 ing itself, shining in itself (inwardly) ; but, far from abiding 
 in this inwardness, it comes as a ground forward into 
 existence; and this existence being grounded not in itself, 
 but on something else, is just appearance. In our imagination 
 we ordinarily combine with the term appearance or pheno- 
 menon the conception of an indefinite congeries of things 
 existing, the being of which is purely relative, and which 
 consequently do not rest on a foundation of their own, but 
 are esteemed only as passing stages. But in this conception 
 it is no less implied that essence does not linger behind or 
 beyond appearance. Rather it is, we may say, the infinite 
 kindness which lets its own show freely issue into immediacy, 
 and graciously allows it the joy of existence. The appear- 
 ance which is thus created does not stand on its own feet, 
 and has its being not in itself but in something else. God 
 
24.0 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [isr. 
 
 who is the essence, when He lends existence to the passing 
 stages of His own show in Himself, may be described as the 
 goodness that creates a world ; but He is also the power 
 above it, and the righteousness, which manifests the merely 
 phenomenal character of the content of this existing world, 
 whenever it tries to exist in independence. 
 
 Appearance is in every way a very important grade of the 
 logical idea. It may be said to be the distinction of philo- 
 sophy from ordinary consciousness that it sees the merely 
 phenomenal character of what the latter supposes to have a 
 self-subsistent being. The significance of appearance how- 
 ever must be properly grasped, or mistakes will arise. To 
 say that anything is a mere appearance may be misinterpreted 
 to mean that, as compared with what is merely phenomenal, 
 there is greater truth in the immediate, in that which is. 
 Now in strict fact, the case is precisely the reverse. Appear- 
 ance is higher than mere Being, — a richer category because 
 it holds in combination the two elements of reflection-into- 
 self and reflection-into-another : whereas Being (or imme- 
 diacy)is still mere relationlessness,and apparently rests upon 
 itself alone. Still, to say that anything is only an appearance 
 suggests a real flaw, which consists in this, that Appearance 
 is still divided against itself and without intrinsic stability. 
 Beyond and above mere appearance comes in the first place 
 Actuality, the third grade of Essence, of which we shall 
 afterwards speak. 
 
 In the history of Modern Philosophy, Kant has the merit 
 of first rehabilitating this distinction between the common 
 and the philosophic modes of thought. He stopped half-way 
 however, when he attached to Appearance a subjective 
 meaning only, and put the abstract essence immovable out- 
 side it as the thing-in-itself beyond the reach of our cogni- 
 tion. For it is the very nature of the world of immediate 
 objects to be appearance only. Knowing it to be so, we 
 know at the same time the essence, which, far from staying 
 behind or beyond the appearance, rather manifests its own 
 essentiality by deposing the world to a mere appearance. 
 One can hardly quarrel with the plain man who, in his 
 desire for totality, cannot acquiesce in the doctrine of sub- 
 
131-133.] THE PHENOMENAL WORLD. 241 
 
 jective idealism, that we are solely concerned with pheno- 
 mena. The plain man, however, in his desire to save the 
 objectivity of knowledge, may very naturally return to 
 abstract immediacy, and maintain that immediacy to be true 
 and actual. In a little work published under the title, 'A 
 Report, clear as day, to the larger Public touching the proper 
 nature of the Latest Philosophy : an Attempt to force the reader 
 to understand,' Fichte examined the opposition between 
 subjective idealism and immediate consciousness in a popular 
 form, under the shape of a dialogue between the author and 
 the reader, and tried hard to prove that the subjective 
 idealist's point of view was right. In this dialogue the 
 reader complains to the author that he has completely failed 
 to place himself in the idealist's position, and is inconsolable 
 at the thought that things around him are no real things but 
 mere appearances. The affliction of the reader can scarcely 
 be blamed when he is expected to consider himself hemmed 
 in by an impervious circle of purely subjective conceptions. 
 Apart from this subjective view of Appearance, however, we 
 have all reason to rejoice that the things which environ us 
 are appearances and not steadfast and independent existences ; 
 since in that case we should soon perish of hunger, both 
 bodily and mental. 
 
 (a) The World of Appearance. 
 
 132.] The Apparent or Phenomenal exists in such a 
 way, that its subsistence is ipso facto thrown into abey- 
 ance or suspended and is only one stage in the form 
 itself. The form embraces in it the matter or subsist- 
 ence as one of its characteristics. In this way the phe- 
 nomenal has its ground in this (form) as its essence, its 
 reflection-into-self in contrast with its immediacy, but, 
 in so doing, has it only in another aspect of the form. 
 This ground of its is no less phenomenal than itself, and 
 the phenomenon accordingly goes on to an endless me- 
 diation of subsistence by means of form, and thus equally 
 by non-subsistence. This endless inter-mediation is at 
 
 VOL. II. R 
 
242 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [132-133- 
 
 the same time a unity of self-relation ; and existence is 
 developed into a totality, into a world of phenomena, — 
 of reflected finitude, 
 
 {b) Content and Form. 
 
 133.] Outside one another as the phenomena in this 
 phenomenal world are, they form a totality, and are 
 wholly contained in their self-relatedness. In this way 
 the self-relation of the phenomenon is completely speci- 
 fied, it has the Form in itself: and because it is in this 
 identity, has it as essential subsistence. So it comes 
 about that the form is Content : and in its mature phase 
 is the Law of the Phenomenon. When the form, on 
 the contrary, is not reflected into self, it is equivalent 
 to the negative of the phenomenon, to the non-inde- 
 pendent and changeable : and that sort of form is the 
 indifferent or External Form. 
 
 The essential point to keep in mind about the oppo- 
 sition of Form and Content is that the content is not 
 formless, but has the form in its own self, quite as much 
 as the form is external to it. There is thus a doubling of 
 form. At one time it is reflected into itself; and then 
 is identical with the content. At another time it is not 
 reflected into itself, and then is the external existence, 
 which does not at all affect the content. We are here 
 in presence, implicitly, of the absolute correlation of 
 content and form : viz. their reciprocal revulsion, so that 
 content is nothing but the revulsion of form into con- 
 tent, and form nothing but the revulsion of content into 
 form. This mutual revulsion is one of the most impor- 
 tant laws of thought. But it is not explicitly brought 
 out before the Relations of Substance and Causality. 
 
 Form and content are a pair of terms frequently employed 
 by the reflective understanding, especially with a habit of 
 looking on the content as the essential and independent, the 
 
133-] CONTENT AND FORM. 243 
 
 form on the contrary as the unessential and dependent. 
 Against this it is to be noted that both are in fact equally 
 essential ; and that, while a formless content can be as little 
 found as a formless matter, the two (content and matter) 
 are distinguished by this circumstance, that matter, though 
 implicitly not without form, still in its existence manifests a 
 disregard of form, whereas the content, as such, is what it is 
 only because the matured form is included in it. Still the 
 form comes before us sometimes as an existence indifferent 
 and external to content, and does so for the reason that the 
 whole range of Appearance still suffers from externality. 
 In a book, for instance, it certainly has no bearing upon the 
 content, whether it be written or printed, bound in paper or 
 in leather. That however does not in the least imply that 
 apart from such an indifferent and external form, the content 
 of the book is itself formless. There are undoubtedly books 
 enough which even in reference to their content may well be 
 styled formless : but want of form in this case is the same as 
 bad form, and means the defect of the right form, not the 
 absence of all form whatever. So far is this right form from 
 being unaffected by the content that it is rather the content 
 itself A work of art that wants the right form is for that 
 very reason no right or true work of art : and it is a bad way 
 of excusing an artist, to say that the content of his works is 
 good and even excellent, though they want the right form. 
 Real works of art are those where content and form exhibit 
 a thorough identity. The content of the Iliad, it may be 
 said, is the Trojan war, and especially the wrath of Achilles. 
 In that we have everything, and yet very little after all ; for 
 the Iliad is made an Iliad by the poetic form, in which that 
 content is moulded. The content of Romeo and Juliet may 
 similarly be said to be the ruin of two lovers through the 
 discord between their families : but something more is 
 needed to make Shakespeare's immortal tragedy. 
 
 In reference to the relation of form and content in the 
 field of science, we should recollect the difference between 
 philosophy and the rest of the sciences. The latter are finite, 
 because their mode of thought, as a merely formal act, de- 
 rives its content from without. Their content therefore is 
 
244 7-//^ DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. '133-134. 
 
 not known as moulded from within through the thoughts 
 which he at the ground of it, and form and content do not 
 thoroughly interpenetrate each other. Thxs partition dis- 
 appears in philosophy, and thus justifies its title of infinite 
 knowledge. Yet even philosophic thought is often held to 
 be a merely formal act ; and that logic, which confessedly 
 deals only with thoughts qua thoughts, is merely formal, is 
 especially a foregone conclusion. And if content means no 
 more than what is palpable and obvious to the senses, all 
 philosophy and logic in particular must be at once acknow- 
 ledged to be void of content, that is to say, of content per- 
 ceptible to the senses. Even ordinary forms of thought 
 however, and the common usage of language, do not in the 
 least restrict the appellation of content to what is perceived 
 by the senses, or to what has a being in place and time. A 
 book without content is, as every one knows, not a book 
 with empty leaves, but one of which the content is as good 
 as none. We shall find as the last result on closer analysis, 
 that by what is called content an educated mind means no- 
 thing but the presence and power of thought. But this is to 
 admit that thoughts are not empt}^ forms without affinity to 
 their content, and that in other spheres as well as in art the 
 truth and the sterling value of the content essentially depend 
 on the content showing itself identical with the form. 
 
 134.] But immediate existence is a character of the 
 subsistence itself as well as of the form : it is conse- 
 quently external to the character of the content ; but in 
 an equal degree this externality, which the content has 
 through the factor of its subsistence, is essential to it. 
 When thus explicitly stated, the phenomenon is rela- 
 tivity or correlation : where one and the same thing, 
 viz. the content or the developed form, is seen as the 
 externality and antithesis of independent existences, 
 and as their reduction to a relation of identity, in which 
 identification alone the two things distinguished are 
 what they are. 
 
135-] CORRELATION. 245 
 
 [c) Relation or Correlation. 
 
 135.] (<i) The immediate relation is that of the "Whole 
 and the Parts. The content is the whole, and consists 
 of the parts (the form), its counterpart. The parts are 
 diverse one from another. It is they that possess in- 
 dependent being. But they are parts, only when they 
 are identified by being related to one another ; or, in so 
 far as they make up the whole, when taken together. 
 But this ' Together ' is the counterpart and negation of 
 the part. 
 
 Essential correlation is the specific and completely uni- 
 versal phase in which things appear. Everything that exists 
 stands in correlation, and this correlation is the veritable 
 nature of every existence. The existent thing in this way 
 has no being of its own, but only in something else : in this 
 other however it is self-relation ; and correlation is the unity 
 of the self- relation and relation-to-others. 
 
 The relation of the whole and the parts is untrue to this 
 extent, that the notion and the reahty of the relation are not 
 in harmony. The notion of the whole is to contain parts : 
 but if the whole is taken and made what its notion implies, 
 i.e. if it is divided, it at once ceases to be a whole. Things 
 there are, no doubt, which correspond to this relation : but 
 for that very reason they are low and untrue existences. 
 We must remember however what ' untrue ' signifies. When 
 it occurs in a philosophical discussion, the term 'untrue' 
 does not signify that the thing to which it is applied is 
 non-existent. A bad state or a sickly body may exist all 
 the same ; but these things are untrue, because their notion 
 and their reality are out of harmony. 
 
 The relation of whole and parts, being the immediate 
 relation, comes easy to reflective understanding; and for 
 that reason it often satisfies when the question really turns 
 on profounder ties. The limbs and organs, for instance, of 
 an organic body are not merely parts of it : it is only in 
 their unity that they are wliat they arc, and they arc un- 
 
246 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [135-136. 
 
 questionably affected by that unity, as they also in turn affect 
 it. These limbs and organs become mere parts, only when 
 they pass under the hands of the anatomist, whose occupa- 
 tion, be it remembered, is not with the living body but with 
 the corpse. Not that such analysis is illegitimate : we only 
 mean that the external and mechanical relation of whole 
 and parts is not sufficient for us, if we want to study organic 
 life in its truth. And if this be so in organic life, it is the 
 case to a much greater extent when we apply this relation to 
 the mind and the formations of the spiritual world. Psycho- 
 logists may not expressly speak of parts of the soul or mind, 
 but the mode in which this subject is treated by the analytic 
 understanding is largely founded on the analogy of this 
 finite relation. At least that is so, when the different forms 
 of mental activity are enumerated and described merely in 
 their isolation one after another, as so-called special powers 
 and faculties. 
 
 136.] (3) The one-and-same of this correlation (the 
 self-relation found in it) is thus immediately a negative 
 self-relation. The correlation is in short the mediating 
 process whereby one and the same is first unaffected 
 towards difference, and secondly is the negative self- 
 relation, which repels itself as reflection-into-self to differ- 
 ence, and invests itself (as reflection-into-something-else) 
 with existence, whilst it conversely leads back this re- 
 flection-into-other to self-relation and indifference. This 
 gives the correlation of Force and its Expression. 
 
 The relationship of whole and part is the immediate 
 and therefore unintelligent (mechanical) relation, — a 
 revulsion of self-identity into mere variety. Thus we 
 pass from the whole to the parts, and from the parts 
 to the whole : in the one we forget its opposition to the 
 other, while each on its own account, at one time the 
 whole, at another the parts, is taken to be an indepen- 
 dent existence. In other words, when the parts are 
 declared to subsist in the whole, and the whole to con- 
 sist of the parts, we have either member of the relation 
 
136.] FORCE. 247 
 
 at diflferent times taken to be permanently subsistent, 
 while the other is non-essential. In its superficial form 
 the mechanical nexus consists in the parts being inde- 
 pendent of each other and of the whole. 
 
 This relation may be adopted for the progression ad 
 infinitum, in the case of the divisibility of matter : and 
 then it becomes an unintelligent alternation with the 
 two sides. A thing at one time is taken as a whole : 
 then we go on to specify the parts : this specifying is 
 forgotten, and what was a part is regarded as a whole : 
 then the specifying of the part comes up again, and so 
 on for ever. But if this infinity be taken as the negative 
 which it is, it is the negative self-relating element in 
 the correlation, — Force, the self-identical whole, or im- 
 manency; which yet supersedes this immanency and 
 gives itself expression ; — and conversely the expression 
 which vanishes and returns into Force. 
 
 Force, notwithstanding this infinity, is also finite : for 
 the content, or the one and the same of the Force and 
 its out-putting, is this identity at first only for the ob- 
 server : the two sides of the relation are not yet, each 
 on its own account, the concrete identity of that one 
 and same, not yet the totality. For one another they 
 are therefore different, and the relationship is a finite 
 one. Force consequently requires solicitation from 
 without : it works blindly : and on account of this de- 
 fectiveness of form, the content is also limited and ac- 
 cidental. It is not yet genuinely identical with the 
 form : not yet is it as a notion and an end ; that is to say, 
 it is not intrinsically and actually determinate. This 
 difference is most vital, but not easy to apprehend : it will 
 assume a clearer formulation when we reach Design. 
 If it be overlooked, it leads to the confusion of con- 
 ceiving God as Force, a confusion from which Herder's 
 God especially suffers. 
 
248 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [136. 
 
 It is often said that the nature of Force itself is un- 
 known and only its manifestation apprehended. But, 
 in the first place, it may be replied, every article in the 
 import of Force is the same as what is specified in the 
 Exertion : and the explanation of a phenomenon by a 
 Force is to that extent a mere tautology. What is sup- 
 posed to remain unknown, therefore, is really nothing 
 but the empty form of reflection-into-self, by which alone 
 the Force is distinguished from the Exertion, — and that 
 form too is something familiar. It is a form that does 
 not make the slightest addition to the content and to 
 the law, which have to be discovered from the pheno- 
 menon alone. Another assurance always given is that 
 to speak of forces implies no theory as to their nature : 
 and that being so, it is impossible to see why the 
 form of Force has been introduced into the sciences 
 at all. In the second place the nature of Force is un- 
 doubtedly unknown : we are still without any necessity 
 binding and connecting its content together in itself, 
 as we are without necessity in the content, in so far as 
 it is expressly limited and hence has its character by 
 means of another thing outside it. 
 
 (i) Compared with the immediate relation of whole and 
 parts, the relation between force and its putting-forth may 
 be considered infinite. In it that identity of the two sides is 
 realised, which in the former relation only existed for the 
 observer. The whole, though we can see that it consists of 
 parts, ceases to be a whole when it is divided : whereas force 
 is only shown to be force when it exerts itself, and in its 
 exercise only comes back to itself. The exercise is only 
 force once more. Yet, on further examination even this 
 relation will appear finite, and finite in virtue of this me- 
 diation : just as, conversely, the relation of whole and parts 
 is obviously finite in virtue of its immediacy. The first 
 and simplest evidence for the finitude of the mediated re- 
 lation of force and its exercise is, that each and every force 
 
136.] FORCE. 249 
 
 is conditioned and requires something else than itself for its 
 subsistence. For instance, a special vehicle of magnetic 
 force, as is well known, is iron, the other properties of which, 
 such as its colour, specific weight, or relation to acids, are 
 independent of this connexion with magnetism. The same 
 thing is seen in all other forces, which from one end to the 
 other are found to be conditioned and mediated by some- 
 thing else than themselves. Another proof of the finite 
 nature of force is that it requires solicitation before it can 
 put itself forth. That through which the force is solicited, is 
 itself another exertion of force, which cannot put itself forth 
 without similar solicitation. This brings us either to a 
 repetition of the infinite progression, or to a reciprocity of 
 soliciting and being solicited. In either case we have no 
 absolute beginning of motion. Force is not as yet, like the 
 final cause, inherently self-determining: the content is given 
 to it as determined, and force, when it exerts itself, is, 
 according to the phrase, blind in its working. That phrase 
 implies the distinction between abstract force-manifestation 
 and teleological action. 
 
 (2) The oft-repeated statement, that the exercise of the 
 force and not the force itself admits of being known, must be 
 rejected as groundless. It is the very essence of force to 
 manifest itself, and thus in the totality of manifestation, con- 
 ceived as a law, we at the same time discover the force itself. 
 And yet this assertion that force in its own self is unknow- 
 able betrays a well-grounded presentiment that this relation 
 is finite. The several manifestations of a force at first meet 
 us in indefinite multiplicity, and in their isolation seem acci- 
 dental : but, reducing this multiplicity to its inner unity, 
 which we term force, we see that the apparentl}- contingent is 
 necessar}', by recognising the law that rules it. But the dif- 
 ferent forces themselves are a multiplicity again, and in their 
 mere juxtaposition seem to be contingent. Hence in em- 
 pirical physics, we speak of the forces of gravity, magnetism, 
 electricity, &c., and in empirical psychology of the forces 
 of memory, imagination, will, and all the other faculties. 
 All this multiplicity again excites a craving to know these 
 different forces as a single whole, nor would this craving be 
 
250 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [136. 
 
 appeased even if the several forces were traced back to 
 one common primary force. Such a primary force would 
 be really no more than an empty abstraction, with as little 
 content as the abstract thing-in-itself. And besides this, 
 the correlation of force and manifestation is essentially a 
 mediated correlation (of reciprocal dependence), and it must 
 therefore contradict the notion of force to view it as primary 
 or resting on itself. 
 
 Such being the case with the nature of force, though we 
 may consent to let the world be called a manifestation of 
 divine forces, we should object to have God Himself viewed 
 as a mere force. For force is after all a subordinate and 
 finite category. At the so-called renascence of the sciences, 
 when steps were taken to trace the single phenomena of 
 nature back to underlying forces, the Church branded the 
 enterprise as impious. The argument of the Church was as 
 follows. If it be the forces of gravitation, of vegetation, &c. 
 which occasion the movements of the heavenly bodies, the 
 growth of plants, &c., there is nothing left for divine pro- 
 vidence, and God sinks to the level of a leisurely onlooker, 
 surveying this play of forces. The students of nature, it is 
 true, and Newton more than others, when they employed 
 the reflective category of force to explain natural pheno- 
 mena, have expressly pleaded that the honour of God, as 
 the Creator and Governor of the world, would not thereby 
 be impaired. Still the logical issue of this explanation by 
 means of forces is that the inferential understanding pro- 
 ceeds to fix each of these forces, and to maintain them in 
 their finitude as ultimate. And contrasted with this de- 
 infinitised world of independent forces and matters, the only 
 terms in which it is possible still to describe God will pre- 
 sent Him in the abstract infinity of an unknowable supreme 
 Being in some other world far away. This is precisely the 
 position of materialism, and of modern ' free-thinking,' 
 whose theology ignores what God is and restricts itself to 
 the mere fact that He is. In this dispute therefore the 
 Church and the religious mind have to a certain extent the 
 right on their side. The finite forms of understanding 
 certainly fail to fulfil the conditions for a knowledge either 
 
136-I37-] FORCE. 251 
 
 of Nature or of the formations in the world of Mind as they 
 truly are. Yet on the other side it is impossible to overlook 
 the formal right which, in the first place, entitles the empi- 
 rical sciences to vindicate the right of thought to know the 
 existent world in all the speciality of its content, and to seek 
 something further than the bare statement of mere abstract 
 faith that God creates and governs the world. When our 
 religious consciousness, resting upon the authority of the 
 Church, teaches us that God created the world by His 
 almighty will, that He guides the stars in their courses, and 
 vouchsafes to all His creatures their existence and their well- 
 being, the question Why ? is still left to answer. Now it is 
 the answer to this question which forms the common task of 
 empirical science and of philosophy. When religion refuses 
 to recognise this problem, or the right to put it, and appeals 
 to the unsearchableness of the decrees of God, it is taking 
 up the same agnostic ground as is taken by the mere En- 
 lightenment of understanding. Such an appeal is no better 
 than an arbitrary dogmatism, which contravenes the express 
 command of Christianity, to know God in spirit and in truth, 
 and is prompted by a humility which is not Christian, but 
 born of ostentatious bigotry. 
 
 137.J Force is a whole, which is in its own self nega- 
 tive self-relation ; and as such a whole it continually 
 pushes itself off from itself and puts itself forth. But 
 since this reflection-into-another (corresponding to the 
 distinction between the Parts of the Whole) is equally 
 a reflection-into-self, this out-putting is the way and 
 means by which Force that returns back into itself is 
 as a Force. The very act of out-putting accordingly 
 sets in abeyance the diversity of the two sides which 
 is found in this correlation, and expressly states the 
 identity which virtually constitutes their content. The 
 truth of Force and utterance therefore is that relation, 
 in which the two sides are distinguished only as Outward 
 and Inward. 
 
252 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [138-140. 
 
 138.] (y) The Inward (Interior) is the ground, when 
 it stands as the mere form of the one side of the Ap- 
 pearance and the Correlation, — the empty form of re- 
 flection-into-self. As a counterpart to it stands the 
 Outward. (Exterior), — Existence, also as the form of 
 the other side of the correlation, with the empty char- 
 acteristic of reflection-into-something-else. But Inward 
 and Outward are identified : and their identity is iden- 
 tity brought to fulness in the content, that unity of 
 reflection-into-self and reflection-into-other which was 
 forced to appear in the movement of force. Both are 
 the same one totality, and this unity makes them the 
 content. 
 
 139.] In the first place then. Exterior is the same 
 content as Interior. What is inwardly is also found 
 outwardly, and vice versa. The appearance shows no- 
 thing that is not in the essence, and in the essence there 
 is nothing but what is manifested. 
 
 140.] In the second place, Inward and Outward, as 
 formal terms, are also reciprocally opposed, and that 
 thoroughly. The one is the abstraction of identity with 
 self; the other, of mere multiplicity or reality. But as 
 stages of the one form, they are essentially identical : 
 so that whatever is at first explicitly put only in the 
 one abstraction, is also as plainly and at one step only 
 in the other. Therefore what is only internal is also 
 only external : and what is only external, is so far only 
 at first internal. 
 
 It is the customary mistake of reflection to take the 
 essence to be merely the interior. If it be so taken, 
 even this way of looking at it is purely external, and that 
 sort of essence is the empty external abstraction. 
 
 3nS 3iuiere bcr 5)latur 
 JDringt tein eifc^affner ©eifi, 
 
MO.] INWARD AND OUTWARD. 253 
 
 3" gliicflicfj irenn cr mtr 
 3)ie aut'?cre @ci>aale ivei)!.' 
 It ought rather to have been said that, if the essence 
 of nature is ever described as the inner part, the person 
 who so describes it only knows its outer shell. In 
 Being as a whole, or even in mere sense-perception, 
 the notion is at first only an inward, and for that very 
 reason is something external to Being, a subjective 
 thinking and being, devoid of truth.— In Nature as well 
 as in Mind, so long as the notion, design, or law are at 
 first the inner capacity, mere possibilities, they are first 
 only an external, inorganic nature, the knowledge of a 
 third person, alien force, and the like. As a man is 
 outwardly, that is to say in his actions (not of course in 
 his merely bodily outwardness), so is he inwardly: and 
 if his virtue, morality, &.c. are only inwardly his, — that 
 is if they exist only in his intentions and sentiments, 
 and his outward acts are not identical with them, the 
 one half of him is as hollow and empty as the other. 
 
 The relation of Outward and Inward unites the two rela- 
 tions that precede, and at the same time sets in abeyance 
 mere relativity and phenomenalit}'^ in general. Yet so long 
 as understanding keeps the Inward and Outward fixed in 
 their separation, they are empty forms, the one as null as 
 the other. Not only in the study of nature, but also of the 
 spiritual world, much depends on a just appreciation of the 
 relation of inward and outward, and especially on avoiding 
 the misconception that the former only is the essential point 
 on which everything turns, while the latter is unessential 
 and trivial. We find this mistake made when, as is often 
 done, the difference between nature and mind is traced back 
 ' Compare Goethe's indignant outcry — 'To Natural Science,' 
 vol. i. pt. 3 : 
 
 2)a3 ^cr' xi) fecf^ig 3at)re h?icber^oIen, 
 
 Unt) flu^e brauf, aber Oftflc^Ien, — 
 
 Dhtur ^at h)cbcr ^ern nc^ Sc^aate, 
 
 51 Hf^ ifl fte mit einftn ^o.U. 
 
254 T-Z/E DOCTRIN£^ OF ESSENCE. [140. 
 
 to the abstract difference between inner and outer. As for 
 nature, it certainly is in the gross external, not merely to 
 the mind, but even on its own part. But to call it external 
 'in the gross' is not to imply an abstract externality— for 
 there is no such thing. It means rather that the Idea which 
 forms the common content of nature and mind, is found in 
 nature as outward only, and for that very reason only in- 
 ward. The abstract understanding, with its * Either — or,' 
 may struggle against this conception of nature. It is none 
 the less obviously found in our other modes of consciousness, 
 particularly in religion. It is the lesson of religion that 
 nature, no less than the spiritual world, is a revelation of 
 God : but with this distinction, that while nature never gets 
 so far as to be conscious of its divine essence, that conscious- 
 ness is the express problem of the mind, which in the matter 
 of that problem is as yet finite. Those who look upon the 
 essence of nature as mere inwardness, and therefore inacces- 
 sible to us, take up the same line as that ancient creed which 
 regarded God as envious and jealous ; a creed which both 
 Plato and Aristotle pronounced against long ago. All that 
 God is. He imparts and reveals ; and He does so, at first, in 
 and through nature. 
 
 Any object indeed is faulty and imperfect when it is only 
 inward, and thus at the same time only outward, or, (which 
 is the same thing,) when it is only an outward and thus only 
 an inward. For instance, a child, taken in the gross as 
 human being, is no doubt a rational creature ; but the reason 
 of the child as child is at first a mere inward, in the shape of 
 his natural ability or vocation, &c. This mere inward, at the 
 same time, has for the child the form of a more outward, in 
 the shape of the will of his parents, the attainments of his 
 teachers, and the whole world of reason that environs him. 
 The education and instruction of a child aim at making him 
 actually and for himself what he is at first potentially and 
 therefore for others, viz. for his grown-up friends. The 
 reason, which at first exists in the child only as an inner 
 possibility, is actualised through education : and conversely, 
 the child by these means becomes conscious that the good- 
 ness, religion, and science which he had at first looked upon 
 
 1 
 
140.] INWARD AND OUTWARD. 255 
 
 as an outward authority, are his own and inward nature. 
 As with the child so it is in this matter with the adult, when, 
 in opposition to his true destiny, his intellect and will remain 
 in the bondage of the natural man. Thus, the criminal sees 
 the punishment to which he has to submit as an act of 
 violence from without : whereas in fact the penalty is only 
 the manifestation of his own criminal will. 
 
 From what has now been said, we may learn what to 
 think of a man who, when blamed for his shortcomings, 
 it may be, his discreditable acts, appeals to the (professedly) 
 excellent intentions and sentiments of the inner self he dis- 
 tinguishes therefrom. There certainly may be individual 
 cases, where the malice of outward circumstances frustrates 
 well-meant designs, and disturbs the execution of the best- 
 laid plans. But in general even here the essential unity be- 
 tween inward and outward is maintained. We are thus 
 justified in saying that a man is what he does ; and the 
 lying vanity which consoles itself with the feeling of inward 
 excellence, may be confronted with the words of the gospel : 
 ' By their fruits ye shall know them.' That grand saying 
 applies primarily in a moral and religious aspect, but it also 
 holds good in reference to performances in art and science.. 
 The keen eye of a teacher who perceives in his pupil 
 decided evidences of talent, may lead him to state his opinion 
 that a Raphael or a Mozart lies hidden in the boy : and the 
 result will show how far such an opinion was well-founded. 
 But if a daub of a painter, or a poetaster, soothe themselves 
 by the conceit that their head is full of high ideals, their 
 consolation is a poor one ; and if they insist on being judged 
 not by their actual works but by their projects, we may 
 safely reject their pretensions as unfounded and unmeaning. 
 The converse case however also occurs. In passing judg- 
 ment on men who have accomplished something great and 
 good, we often make use of the false distinction between 
 inward and outward. All that they have accomplished, we 
 say, is outward -merely ; inwardly they were acting from 
 some very different motive, such as a desire to gratify their 
 vanity or other unworthy passion. This is the spirit of 
 envy. Incapable of any great action of its own, envy tries 
 
256 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [140. 
 
 hard to depreciate greatness and to bring it down to its own 
 level. Let us, rather, recall the fine expression of Goethe, 
 that there is no remedy but Love against great superiorities 
 of others. We may seek to rob men's great actions of their 
 grandeur, by the insinuation of hypocrisy ; but, though it is 
 possible that men in an instance now and then may dis- 
 semble and disguise a good deal, they cannot conceal the 
 whole of their inner self, which infallibly betrays itself in 
 the decursHS vitae. Even here it is true that a man is nothing 
 but the series of his actions. 
 
 What is called the ' pragmatic ' writing of history has in 
 modern times frequently sinned in its treatment of great 
 historical characters, and defaced and tarnished the true con- 
 ception of them by this fallacious separation of the outward 
 from the inward. Not content with telling the unvarnished 
 tale of the great acts which have been wrought by the 
 heroes of the world's history, and with acknowledging that 
 their inward being corresponds with the import of their 
 acts, the pragmatic historian fancies himself justified and 
 even obliged to trace the supposed secret motives that lie 
 behind the open facts of the record. The historian, in that 
 case, is supposed to write with more depth in proportion as 
 he succeeds in tearing away the aureole from all that has 
 been heretofore held grand and glorious, and in depressing 
 it, so far as its origin and proper significance are concerned, 
 to the level of vulgar mediocrity. To make these prag- 
 matical researches in history easier, it is usual to recom- 
 mend the study of psychology, which is supposed to make 
 us acquainted with the real motives of human actions. The 
 psychology in question however is only that petty know- 
 ledge of men, which looks away from the essential and 
 permanent in human nature to fasten its glance on the 
 casual and private features shown in isolated instincts and 
 passions. A pragmatical psychology ought at least to leave 
 the historian, who investigates the motives at the ground of 
 great actions, a choice between the ' substantial ' interests of 
 patriotism, justice, religious truth and the like, on the one 
 hand, and the subjective and ' formal ' interests of vanity, 
 ambition, avarice and the like, on the other. The latter 
 
140-142.] ACTUALITY. 257 
 
 however are the motives which must be viewed by the 
 pragmatist as really efficient, otherwise the assumption of a 
 contrast between the inward (the disposition of the agent) 
 and the outward (the import of the action) would fall to the 
 ground. But inward and outward have in truth the same 
 content ; and the right doctrine is the very reverse of this 
 pedantic judiciality. If the heroes of history had been ac- 
 tuated by subjective and formal interests alone, they would 
 never have accomplished what they have. And if we have 
 due regard to the unity between the inner and the outer, we 
 must own that great men willed what they did, and did what 
 they willed. 
 
 141.] The empty abstractions, by means of which the 
 one identical content perforce continues in the two cor- 
 relatives, suspend themselves in the immediate transi- 
 tion, the one in the other. The content is itself nothing 
 but their identity (§ 138) : and these abstractions are 
 the seeming of essence, put as seeming. By the mani- 
 festation of force the inward is put into existence : but 
 this putting is the mediation by empty abstractions. In 
 its own self the intermediating process vanishes to the 
 immediacy, in which the inward and the outward are 
 absolutely identical and their difference is distinctly no 
 more than assumed and imposed. This identity is Ac- 
 tuality. 
 
 C— Actuality. 
 
 142.] Actuality is the unity, become immediate, of 
 essence with existence, or of inward with outward. 
 The utterance of the actual is the actual itself: so that 
 in this utterance it remains just as essential, and only 
 is essential, in so far as it is in immediate external 
 existence. 
 
 We have ere this met Being and Existence as forms 
 of the immediate. Being is, in general, unreflected im- 
 mediacy and transition into another. Existence is im- 
 mediate unity of being and reflection ; hence appearance : 
 
 VOL 11. s 
 
258 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [142. 
 
 it comes from the ground, and falls to the ground. In 
 actuality this unity is explicitly put, and the two sides 
 of the relation identified. Hence the actual is exempted 
 from transition, and its externality is its energising. 
 In that energising it is reflected into itself: its exist- 
 ence is only the manifestation of itself, not of an other. 
 
 Actuality and thought (or Idea) are often absurdly opposed. 
 How commonly we hear people saying that, though no 
 objection can be urged against the truth and correctness of 
 a certain thought, there is nothing of the kind to be seen 
 in actuality, or it cannot be actually carried out! People 
 who use such language only prove that they have not pro- 
 perly apprehended the nature either of thought or of actu- 
 ality. Thought in such a case is, on one hand, the synonym 
 for a subjective conception, plan, intention or the like, just as 
 actuality, on the other, is made synonymous with external 
 and sensible existence. This is all very well in common 
 life, where great laxity is allowed in the categories and the 
 names given to them : and it may of course happen that 
 e.g. the plan, or so-called idea, say of a certain method of 
 taxation, is good and advisable in the abstract, but that no- 
 thing of the sort is found in so-called actuality, or could 
 possibly be carried out under the given conditions. But 
 when the abstract understanding gets hold of these cate- 
 gories and exaggerates the distinction they imply into a 
 hard and fast line of contrast, when it tells us that in this 
 actual world we must knock ideas out of our heads, it is 
 necessary energetically to protest against these doctrines, 
 alike in the name of science and of sound reason. For on 
 the one hand Ideas are not confined to our heads merely, 
 nor is the Idea, upon the whole, so feeble as to leave the 
 question of its actuaUsation or non-actualisation dependent 
 on our will. The Idea is rather the absolutely active as well 
 as actual. And on the other hand actuality is not so bad and 
 irrational, as purblind or wrong-headed and muddle-brained 
 would-be reformers imagine. So far is actuality, as dis- 
 tinguished from mere appearance, and primarily present- 
 ing a unity of inward and outward, from being in contrariety 
 
142-143] ACTUALITY. 259 
 
 with reason, that it is rather thoroughly reas6nable, and 
 everything which is not reasonable must on that very ground 
 cease to be held actual. The same view may be traced in 
 the usages of educated speech, which declines to give the 
 name of real poet or real statesman to a poet or a statesman 
 who can do nothing really meritorious or reasonable. 
 
 In that vulgar conception of actuality which mistakes for 
 it what is palpable and directly obvious to the senses, we 
 must seek the ground of a wide-spread prejudice about the 
 relation of the philosophy of Aristotle to that of Plato. 
 Popular opinion makes the difference to be as follows. 
 While Plato recognises the idea and only the idea as the 
 truth, Aristotle, rejecting the idea, keeps to what is actual, 
 and is on that account to be considered the founder and 
 chief of empiricism. On this it may be remarked : that 
 although actuality certainly is the principle of the Aristotelian 
 philosophy, it is not the vulgar actuality of what is imme- 
 diately at hand, but the idea as actuality. Where then lies 
 the controversy of Aristotle against Plato ? It lies in this. 
 Aristotle calls the Platonic idea a mere hvvafu^, and estab- 
 lishes in opposition to Plato that the idea, which both 
 equally recognise to be the only truth, is essentially to be 
 viewed as an tvipyeia, in other words, as the inward which 
 is quite to the fore, or as the unity of inner and outer, or as 
 actuality, in the emphatic sense here given to the word. 
 
 143.] Such a concrete category as Actuality includes 
 the characteristics aforesaid and their difference, and 
 is therefore also the development of them, in such a 
 way that, as it has them, they are at the same time 
 plainly understood to be a show, to be assumed or im- 
 posed (§ 141). 
 
 (a) Viewed as an identity in general, Actuality is first 
 of all Possibility — the reflection-into-self which, as in 
 contrast with the concrete unity of the actual, is taken 
 and made an abstract and unessential essentiality. 
 Possibility is what is essential to reality, but in such a 
 way that it is at the same time only a possibility. 
 
26o THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [143. 
 
 It was probably the import of Possibility which in- 
 duced Kant to regard it along with necessity and ac- 
 tuality as Modalities, 'since these categories do riot in 
 the least increase the notion as object, but only express 
 its relation to the faculty of knowledge.' For Possi- 
 bility is really the bare abstraction of reflection-into-self, 
 — what was formerly called the Inward, only that it is 
 now taken to mean the external inward, lifted out of 
 reality and with the being of a mere supposition, and 
 is thus, sure enough, supposed only as a bare modality, 
 an abstraction which comes short, and, in more con- 
 crete terms, belongs only to subjective thought. It 
 is otherwise with Actuality and Necessity. They are 
 anything but a mere sort and mode for something else : 
 in fact the very reverse of that. If they are supposed, 
 it is as the concrete, not merely supposititious, but intrin- 
 sically complete. 
 
 As Possibility is, in the first instance, the mere form 
 of identity-with-self (as compared with the concrete 
 which is actual), the rule for it merely is that a thing 
 must not be self-contradictory. Thus everything is 
 possible; for an act of abstraction can give any content 
 this form of identity. Everything however is as impos- 
 sible as it is possible. In every content, — which is and 
 must be concrete, — the speciality of its nature may be 
 viewed as a specialised contrariety and in that way as a 
 contradiction. Nothing therefore can be more mean- 
 ingless than to speak of such possibility and impossi- 
 bility. In philosophy, in particular, there should never 
 be a word said of showing that ' It is possible,' or * There 
 is still another possibility,' or, to adopt another phrase- 
 ology, ' It is conceivable.' The same consideration 
 should warn the writer of history against employing a 
 category which has now been explained to be on its 
 own merits untrue : but the subtlety of the empty un- 
 
1 43-] POSSIBILITY. 26 1 
 
 derstanding finds its chief pleasure in the fantastic inge- 
 nuity of suggesting possibih'ties and lots of possibilities. 
 
 Our picture-thought is at first disposed to see in possi- 
 bihty the richer and more comprehensive, in actuality the 
 poorer and narrower category. Everything, it is said, is 
 possible, but everything which is possible is not on that 
 account actual. In real truth, however, if we deal with 
 them as thoughts, actuality is the more comprehensive, 
 because it is the concrete thought which includes possibility 
 as an abstract element. And that superiority is to some 
 extent expressed in our ordinary mode of thought when we 
 speak of the possible, in distinction from the actual, as only 
 possible. Possibility is often said to consist in a thing's 
 being thinkable. ' Think,' however, in this use of the word, 
 only means to conceive any content under the form of an 
 abstrac. identity. Now every content can be brought under 
 this form, since nothing is required except to separate it 
 from the relations in which it stands. Hence any content, 
 however absurd and nonsensical, can be viewed as possible. 
 It is possible that the moon might fall upon the earth to- 
 night ; for the moon is a body separate from the earth, - 
 and may as well fall down upon it as a stone thrown into 
 the air does. It is possible that the Sultan may becomt 
 Pope ; for, being a man, he may be converted to the Chris- 
 tian faith, may become a Catholic priest, and so on. In lan- 
 guage like this about possibilities, it is chiefly the law of the 
 sufficient ground or reason which is manipulated in the 
 style already explained. Everything, it is said, is possible, 
 for which you can state some ground. The less education a 
 man has, or, in other words, the less he knows of the specific 
 connexions of the objects to which he directs his observa- 
 tions, the greater is his tendency to launch out into all sorts 
 of empty possibilities. An instance of this habit in the 
 political sphere is seen in the pot-house politician. In prac- 
 tical life too it is no uncommon thing to see ill-will and 
 indolence slink behind the category of possibility, in order 
 to escape definite obligations. To such conduct the same 
 remarks apply as were made in connexion with the law 
 
262 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [143-144- 
 
 of sufficient ground. Reasonable and practical men refuse 
 to be imposed upon by the possible, for the simple ground 
 that it is possible only. They stick to the actual (not mean- 
 ing by that word merely whatever immediately is now and 
 here). Many of the proverbs of common life express the 
 same contempt for what is abstractly possible. ' A bird in 
 the hand is worth two in the bush.' 
 
 After all there is as good reason for taking everything to 
 be impossible, as to be possible: for every content (a content 
 is always concrete) includes not only diverse but even oppo- 
 site characteristics. Nothing is so impossible, for instance, 
 as this, that I am : for ' I ' is at the same time simple self- 
 relation and, as undoubtedly, relation to something else. 
 The same may be seen in every other fact in the natural or 
 spiritual world. Matter, it may be said, is impossible : for it 
 is the unity of attraction and repulsion. The same is true of 
 life, law, freedom, and above all, of God Himself, as the true, 
 i. e. the triune God,— a notion of God, which the abstract 
 'Enlightenment' of Understanding, in conformity with its 
 canons, rejected on the allegation that it was contradictory in 
 thought. Generally speaking, it is the empty understanding 
 which haunts these empty forms : and the business of philo- 
 sophy in the matter is to show how null and meaningless 
 they are. Whether a thing is possible or impossible, de- 
 pends altogether on the subject-matter : that is, on the sum 
 total of the elements in actuality, which, as it opens itself 
 out, discloses itself to be necessity. 
 
 144.] (/3) But the Actual in its distinction from possi- 
 bility (which is reflection-into-self) is itself only the out- 
 ward concrete, the unessential immediate. In other 
 words, to such extent as the actual is primarily (§ 142) 
 the simple merely immediate unity of Inward and Out- 
 ward, it is obviously made an unessential outward, and 
 thus at the same time (^ 140) it is merely inward, the 
 abstraction of reflection-into-self. Hence it is itself 
 characterised as a merely possible. When thus valued 
 at the rate of a mere possibility, the actual is a Con- 
 
144-145-] CONTINGENCY. 263 
 
 tingent or Accidental, and, conversely, possibility is 
 mere Accident itself or Chance. 
 
 145.] Possibility and Contingenc}^ are the two factors 
 of Actuality, — Inward and Outward, put as mere forms 
 which constitute the externality of the actual. They 
 have their reflection-into-self on the body of actual fact, 
 or content, with its intrinsic definiteness which gives 
 the essential ground of their characterisation. The 
 finitude of the contingent and -the possible lies, there- 
 fore, as we now see, in the distinction of the form-deter- 
 mination from the content : and, therefore, it depends 
 on the content alone whether anything is contingent 
 and possible. 
 
 As possibility is the mere inside of actuality, it is for that 
 reason a mere outside actuality, in other words, Contingency. 
 The contingent, roughly speaking, is what has the ground of 
 its being not in itself but in somewhat else. Such is the 
 aspect under which actuality first comes before conscious- 
 ness, and which is often mistaken for actuality itself. But the 
 contingent is only one side of the actual, — the side, namely, 
 of reflection on somewhat else. It is the actual, in the 
 signification of something merely possible. Accordingly w^e 
 consider the contingent to be what may or may not be, 
 what may be in one way or in another, whose being or 
 not-being, and whose being on this wise or otherwise, 
 depends not upon itself but on something else. To over- 
 come this contingency is, roughly speaking, the problem of 
 science on the one hand ; as in the range of practice, on the 
 other, the end of action is to rise above the contingency of 
 the will, or above caprice. It has however often happened, 
 most of all in modern times, that contingency has been un- 
 warrantably elevated, and had a value attached to it, both in 
 nature and the world of mind, to which it has no just claim. 
 Frequently Nature— to take it first,— has been chiefly admired 
 for the richness and variety of its structures. Apart, how- 
 ever, from what disclosure it contains of the Idea, this rich- 
 ness gratifies none of the higher interests of reason, and in 
 
264 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [145- 
 
 its vast variety of structures, organic and inorganic, affords 
 us only the spectacle of a contingency losing itself in 
 vagueness. At anj'^ rate, the chequered scene presented by 
 the several varieties of anjmals and plants, conditioned as it 
 is by outward circumstances,— the complex changes in the 
 figuration and grouping of clouds, and the like, ought not to 
 be ranked higher than the equally casual fancies of the mind 
 which surrenders itself to its own caprices. The wonder- 
 ment with which such phenomena are welcomed is a most 
 abstract frame of mind, from which one should advance to a 
 closer insight into the innerharmonyand uniformity of nature. 
 Of contingency in respect of the Will it is especially im- 
 portant to form a proper estimate. The Freedom of the Will 
 is an expression that often means mere free-choice, or the 
 will in the form of contingency. Freedom of choice, or the 
 capacity of determining ourselves towards one thing or 
 another, is undoubtedly a vital element in the will (which in 
 its very notion is free) ; but instead of being freedom itself, 
 it is only in the first instance a freedom in form. The 
 genuinely free will, which includes free choice as sus- 
 pended, is conscious to itself that its content is intrinsically 
 firm and fast, and knows it at the same time to be thoroughly 
 its own. A will, on the contrary, which remains standing 
 on the grade of option, even supposing it does decide in 
 favour of what is in import right and true, is always haunted 
 by the conceit that it might, if it had so pleased, have decided 
 in favour of the reverse course. When more narrowly ex- 
 amined, free choice is seen to be a contradiction, to this 
 extent that its form and content stand in antithesis. The 
 matter of choice is given, and known as a content dependent 
 not on the will itself, but on outward circumstances. In 
 reference to such a given content, freedom lies only in the 
 form of choosing, which, as it is only a freedom in form, may 
 consequently be regarded as freedom only in supposition. 
 On an ultimate analysis it will be seen that the same out- 
 wardness of circumstances, on which is founded the content 
 that the will finds to its hand, can alone account for the will 
 giving its decision for the one and not the other of the two 
 alternatives. 
 
145-146] CHANCE AND FREEWILL. 265 
 
 Although contingency, as it has thus been shown, is only 
 one aspect in the whole of actuality, and therefore not to be 
 mistaken for actuality itself, it has no less than the rest of 
 the forms of the idea its due office in the world of objects. 
 This is, in the first place, seen in Nature. On the surface of 
 Nature, so to speak, Chance ranges unchecked, and that 
 contingency must simply be recognised, without the pre- 
 tension sometimes erroneously ascribed to philosophy, of 
 seeking to find in it a could-only-be-so-and-not-otherwise. 
 Nor is contingency less visible in the world of Mind. The will, 
 as we have already remarked, includes contingency under 
 the shape of option or free-choice, but only as a vanishing and 
 abrogated element. In respect of Mind and its works, just 
 as in the case of Nature, we must guard against being so far 
 misled by a well-meant endeavour after rational knowledge, 
 as to try to exhibit the necessity of phenomena which are 
 marked by a decided contingency, or, as the phrase is, to 
 construe them a priori. Thus in language (although it be, as 
 it were, the body of thought) Chance still unquestionably 
 plays a decided part ; and the same is true of the creations 
 of law, of art, &c. The problem of science, and especially 
 of philosophy, undoubtedly consists in eliciting the necessity 
 concealed under the semblance of contingency. That how- 
 ever is far from meaning that the. contingent belongs to our 
 subjective conceptioa alone, and must therefore be simply 
 set aside, if we wish to get at the truth. All scientific re- 
 searches which pursue this tendency exclusively, lay them- 
 selves fairly open to the charge of mere jugglery and an 
 over-strained precisianism. 
 
 146.] When more closely examined, what the afore- 
 said outward side of actuality implies is this. Con- 
 tingency, which is actuality in its immediacy, is the 
 self-identical, essentially only as a supposition which 
 is no sooner made than it is revoked and leaves an 
 existent externality. In this way, the external con- 
 tingency is something pre-supposed, the immediate 
 existence of which is at the same time a possibility, 
 and has the vocation to be suspended, to be the pos- 
 
266 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [146-147- 
 
 sibility of something else. Now this possibility is the 
 Condition. 
 
 The Contingent, as the immediate actuality, is at the same 
 time the possibility of somewhat else,— no longer however 
 that abstract possibility which we had at first, but the possi- 
 bility which is. And a possibility existent is a Condition. 
 By the Condition of a thing we mean first, an existence, in 
 short an immediate, and secondly the vocation of this im- 
 mediate to be suspended and subserve the actualising of 
 something else. — Immediate actuality is in general as such 
 never what it ought to be ; it is a finite actuality with an 
 inherent flaw, and its vocation is to be consumed. But the 
 other aspect of actuality is its essentiality. This is primarily 
 the inside, which as a mere possibility is no less destined to 
 be suspended. Possibility thus suspended is the issuing of 
 a new actuality, of which the first immediate actuality was 
 the pre-supposition. Here we see the alternation which is 
 involved in the notion of a Condition. The Conditions of a 
 thing seem at first sight to involve no bias any way. Really 
 however an immediate actuality of this kind includes in it 
 the germ of something else altogether. At first this some- 
 thing else is only a possibility : but the form of possibility is 
 soon suspended and translated into actuality. This new 
 actuality thus issuing is the very inside of the immediate 
 actuality which it uses up. Thus there comes into being 
 quite an other shape of things, and yet it is not an other: for 
 the first actuality is only put as what it in essence was. The 
 conditions which are sacrificed, which fall to the ground and 
 are. spent, only unite with themselves in the other actuality. 
 Such in general is the nature of the process of actuality. 
 The actual is no mere case of immediate Being, but, as 
 essential Being, a suspension of itj own immediacy, and 
 thereby mediating itself with itself 
 
 147.] (y) When this externality (of actuality) is thus 
 developed into a circle of the two categories of possi- 
 bility and immediate actuality, showing the intermedia- 
 tion of the one by the other, it is what is called Real 
 
147-] NECESSITY. 267 
 
 Possibility. Being such a circle, further, it is the 
 totality, and thus the content, the actual fact or affair 
 in its all-round definiteness. Whilst in like manner, if 
 we look at the distinction between the two characteristics 
 in this unity, it realises the concrete totality of the form, 
 the immediate self-translation of inner into outer, and 
 of outer into inner. This self-movement of the form is 
 Activity, carrying into effect the fact or affair as a 
 real ground which is self-suspended to actuality, and 
 carrying into effect the contingent actuality, the condi- 
 tions; i.e. it is their reflection-in-self, and their self- 
 suspension to an other actuality, the actuality of the 
 actual fact. If all the conditions are at hand, the fact 
 (event) musi be actual ; and the fact itself is one of the 
 conditions : for being in the first place only inner, it is 
 at first itself only pre-supposed. Developed actuality, 
 as the coincident alternation of inner and outer, the 
 alternation of their opposite motions combined into a 
 single motion, is Necessity. 
 
 Necessity has been defined, and rightly so, as the 
 union of possibility and actuality. This mode of ex- 
 pression, however, gives a superficial and therefore 
 unintelligible description of the very difficult notion of 
 necessity. It is difficult because it is the notion itself, 
 only that its stages or factors are still as actualities, 
 which are yet at the same time to be viewed as forms 
 only, collapsing and transient. In the two following 
 paragraphs therefore an Exposition of the factors which 
 constitute necessity must be given at greater length. 
 
 When anything is said to be necessary, the first question' 
 we ask is. Why ? Anything necessary accordingly comes 
 before us as something due to a supposition, the result of 
 certain antecedents. If we go no further than mere deri- 
 vation from antecedents however, we have not gained a 
 complete notion of what necessity means. What is merely 
 
268 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [147. 
 
 derivative, is what it is, not through itself, but through some- 
 thing else ; and in this way it too is merely contingent. What 
 is necessary, on the other hand, we would have be what it is 
 through itself; and thus, although derivative, it must still 
 contain the antecedent whence it is derived as a vanishing 
 element in itself Hence we say of what is necessary, ' It is.' 
 We thus hold it to be simple, self-relation, in which all de- 
 pendence on something else is removed. 
 
 Necessity is often said to be blind. If that means that in 
 the process of necessity the End or final cause is not explicitly 
 and overtly present, the statement is correct. The process 
 of necessity begins with the existence of scattered circum- 
 stances which appear to have no inter-connexion and no 
 concern one with another. These circumstances are an 
 immediate actuality which collapses, and out of this negation 
 a new actuality proceeds. Here we have a content which in 
 point of form is doubled, once as content of the final realised 
 fact, and once as content of the scattered circumstances 
 whi'.ii appear as if they were positive, and make themselves 
 at first felt in that character. The latter content is in itself 
 nought and is accordingly inverted into its negative, thus be- 
 coming content of the realised fact. The immediate circum- 
 stances fall to the ground as conditions, but are at the same 
 time retained as content of the ultimate reality. From such 
 circumstances and conditions there has, as we say, proceeded 
 quite another thing, and it is for that reason that we call this 
 process of necessity blind. If on the contrary we consider 
 teleological action, we have in the end of action a content 
 which is already fore-known. This activity therefore is not 
 bhnd but seeing. To say that the world is ruled by Pro- 
 vidence implies that design, as what has been absolutely 
 pre-determined, is the active principle, so that the issue 
 corresponds to what has been fore-known and fore-willed. 
 
 The theory however which regards the world as deter- 
 mined throagh necessity and the belief in a divine provi- 
 dence are by no means mutually excluding points of view. 
 The intellectual principle underlying the idea of divine 
 providence will hereafter be shown to be the notion. But 
 the notion is the truth of necessity, which it contains in sus- 
 
147-] NECESSITY AND FROVIDENCE. 269 
 
 pension in itself; just as, conversely, necessity is the notion 
 implicit. Necessity is blind only so long as it is not under- 
 stood. There is nothing therefore more mistaken than the 
 charge of blind f^italism made against the Philosophy of 
 History, when it takes for its problem to understand the 
 necessity of every event. The philosophy of history rightly 
 understood takes the rank of a Theodicee ; and those, who 
 fancy they honour Divine Providence by excluding necessity 
 from it, are really degrading it by this exclusiveness to a blind 
 and irrational caprice. In the simple language of the religious 
 mind which speaks of God's eternal and immutable decrees, 
 there is implied an express recognition that necessity forms 
 part of the essence of God. In his difference from God, man, 
 with his own private opinion and will, follows the call of 
 caprice and arbitrary humour, and thus often finds his acts 
 turn out something quite different from what he had meant 
 and willed. But God knows what He wills, is determined in 
 His eternal will neither by accident from within nor from 
 without, and what He wills He also accomplishes, irresistibly. 
 Necessity gives a point of view which has important bear- 
 ings upon our sentiments and behaviour. When we look upon 
 events as necessary, our situation seems at first sight to lack 
 freedom completely. In the creed of the ancients, as we know, 
 necessity figured as Destiny. The modern point of view, on 
 the contrary, is that of Consolation. And Consolation means 
 that, if we renounce our aims and interests, we do so only in 
 prospect of receiving compensation. Destiny, on the contrary, 
 leaves no room for Consolation. But a close examination of 
 the ancient feeling about destiny, will not by any means 
 reveal a sense of bondage to its power. Rather the reverse. 
 This will clearly appear, if we remember, that the sense 
 of bondage springs from inability to surmount the antithesis, 
 and from looking at what is, and what happens, as contra- 
 dictory to what ought to be and happen. In the ancient mind 
 the feeling was more of the following kind : Because such a 
 thing is, it is, and as it is, so ought it to be. Here there is no 
 contrast to be seen, and therefore no sense of bondage, no 
 pain, and no sorrow. True, indeed, as already remarked, this 
 attitude towards destiny is voio of consolation. But then, on 
 
270 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [147. 
 
 the other hand, it is a frame of mind which does not need 
 consolation, so long as personal subjectivity has not acquired 
 its infinite significance. It is this point on which special 
 stress should be laid in comparing the ancient sentiment with 
 that of the modern and Christian world. 
 
 By Subjectivity, however, we may understand, in the first 
 place, only the natural and finite subjectivity, with its con- 
 tingent and arbitrary content of private interests and in- 
 clinations,— all, in short, that we call person as distinguished 
 from thing : taking ' thing ' in the emphatic sense of the 
 word (in which we use the (correct) expression that it is a 
 question oi things and not oi persons). In this sense of sub- 
 jectivity we cannot help admiring the tranquil resignation of 
 the ancients to destiny, and feeling that it is a much higher 
 and worthier mood than that of the moderns, who obstinately 
 pursue their subjective aims, and when they find themselves 
 constrained to resign the hope of reaching them, console 
 themselves with the prospect of a reward in some other 
 shape. But the term subjectivity is not to be confined merely 
 to the bad and finite kind of it which is contrasted with the 
 thing (fact). In its truth subjectivity is immanent in the fact, 
 and as a subjectivity thus infinite is the very truth of the fact. 
 Thus regarded, the doctrine of consolation receives a newer 
 and a higher significance. It is in this sense that the 
 Christian religion is to be regarded as the religion of conso- 
 lation, and even of absolute consolation, Christianity, we 
 know, teaches that God wishes all men to be saved. That 
 teaching declares that subjectivity has an infinite value. 
 And that consoling power of Christianity just lies in the fact 
 that God Himself is in it known as the absolute subjectivity, 
 so that, inasmuch as subjectivity involves the element of 
 particularity, our particular personality too is recognised 
 not merely as something to be solely and simply nullified, 
 but as at the same time something to be preserved. The gods 
 of the ancient world were also, it is true, looked upon as 
 personal ; but the personality of a Zeus and an Apollo is 
 not a real personality : it is only a figure in the mind. In 
 other words, these gods are mere personifications, which, 
 being such, do not know themselves, and are only known. 
 
147-148] THE CONSOLATIONS OF NECESSITY. 271 
 
 An evidence of this defect and this powcrlessness of the old 
 gods is found even in the rehgious beliefs of antiquity. In 
 the ancient creeds not only men, but even gods, were repre- 
 sented as subject to destiny (n-fTrpaj/xtVov or fifxnp^fvr]), a destiny 
 which we must conceive as necessity not unveiled, and thus 
 as something wholly impersonal, selfless, and bhnd. On the 
 other hand, the Christian God is God not known merely, but 
 also self-knowing ; He is a personality not merely figured in 
 our minds, but rather absolutely actual. 
 
 We must refer to the Philosophy of Religion for a further 
 discussion of the points here touched. But we may note in 
 passing how important it is for any man to meet everything 
 that befalls him with the spirit of the old proverb which de- 
 scribes each man as the architect of his own fortune. That 
 means that it is only himself after all of which a man has 
 the usufruct. The other way would be to lay the blame of 
 whatever we experience upon other men, upon unfavourable 
 circumstances, and the like. And this is a fresh example of 
 the language of unfreedom, and at the same time the spring 
 of discontent. If man saw, on the contrary, that whatever 
 happens to him is only the outcome of himself, and that he 
 only bears his own guilt, he would stand free, and in every- 
 thing that came upon him would have the consciousness 
 that he suffered no wrong. A man who lives in dispeace 
 with himself and his lot, commits much that is perverse and 
 amiss, for no other reason than because of the false opinion 
 that he is wronged by others. No doubt too there is a great 
 deal of chance in what befalls us. But the chance has its 
 root in the ' natural ' man. So long however as a man is 
 otherwise conscious that he is free, his harmony of soul and 
 peace of mind will not be destroyed by the disagreeables that 
 befall him. It is their view of necessity, therefore, which is 
 at the root of the content and discontent of men, and which 
 in that way determines their destiny itself. 
 
 148.] Among the three elements in the process of 
 necessity — the Condition, the Fact, and the Activity — 
 
 a. The Condition is {") what is pre-supposed or ante- 
 stated, i. e. it is not only supposed or stated, and so only 
 
272 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [148. 
 
 a correlative to the fact, but also prior, and so inde- 
 pendent, a contingent and external circumstance which 
 exists without respect to the fact. While thus contin- 
 gent, however, this pre-supposed or ante-stated term, 
 in respect withal of the fact, which is the totality, is a 
 complete circle of conditions. (;3) The conditions are 
 passive, are used as materials for the fact, into the 
 content of which they thus enter. They are likewise 
 intrinsically conformable to this content, and already 
 contain its whole characteristic. 
 
 b. The Fact is also (a) something pre-supposed or 
 ante-stated, i.e. it is at first, and as supposed, only inner 
 and possible, and also, being prior, an independent con- 
 tent by itself. (/3) By using up the conditions, it receives 
 its external existence, the realisation of the articles of its 
 content, which reciprocally correspond to the conditions,, 
 so that whilst it presents itself out of these as the fact, it 
 also pioceeds from them. 
 
 c. The Activity similarly has (a) an independent 
 existence of its own (as a man, a character), and at the 
 same time it is possible only where the conditions are 
 and the fact. (^) It is the movement which translates 
 the conditions into fact, and the latter into the former 
 as the side of existence, or rather the movement which 
 educes the fact from the conditions in which it is poten- 
 tially present, and which gives existence to the fact by 
 abolishing the existence possessed by the conditions. 
 
 In so far as these three elements stand to each other 
 in the shape of independent existences, this process has 
 the aspect of an outward necessity. Outward necessity 
 has a limited content for its fact. For the fact is this 
 whole, in phase of singleness. But since in its form 
 this whole is external to itself, it is self-externalised 
 even in its own self and in its content, and this exter- 
 nality, attaching to the fact, is a limit of its content. 
 
I49-I50-] SUBSTANCE AND ACCIDENTS. 273 
 
 149.] Necessity, then, is potentially the one essence, 
 self-same but now full of content, in the reflected light 
 of which its distinctions take the form of independent 
 realities. This self-sameness is at the same time, as 
 absolute form, the activity which reduces into depen- 
 dency and mediates into immediacy. — Whatever is 
 necessary is through an other, which is broken up into 
 the mediating ground (the Fact and the Activity) and 
 an immediate actuality or accidental circumstance, which 
 is at the same time a Condition. The necessary, being 
 through an other, is not in and for itself: hypothetical, 
 it is a mere result of assumption. But this inter- 
 mediation is just as immediately however the abrogation 
 of itself. The ground and contingent condition is trans- 
 lated into immediacy, by which that dependency is now 
 lifted up into actuality, and the fact has closed with 
 itself. In this return to itself the necessary simply and 
 positively is, as unconditioned actuality. The necessary 
 is so, mediated through a circle of circumstances : it is 
 so, because the circumstances are so, and at the same 
 time it is so, unmediated : it is so, because it is. 
 
 {a) Relationship of Substantiality. 
 
 150.J The necessary is in itself an absolute correlation 
 of elements, i.^e. the process developed (in the preceding 
 paragraphs), in which the correlation also suspends itself 
 to absolute identity. 
 
 In its immediate form it is the relationship of Sub- 
 stance and Accident. The absolute self-identity of this 
 relationship is Substance as such, which as necessity 
 gives the negative to this form of inwardness, and thus 
 invests itself with actuality, but which also gives the 
 negative to this outward thing. In this negativity, the 
 actual, as immediate, is only an accidental which through 
 this bare possibility passes over into another actuality. 
 
 VOL. II. T 
 
274 ^^^ DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [150-151. 
 
 This transition is the identity of substance, regarded as 
 form-activity (§§ 148, 149), 
 
 151.] Substance is accordingly the totality of the Ac- 
 cidents, revealing itself in them as their absolute nega- 
 tivity, (that is to say, as absolute power,) and at the 
 same time as the wealth of all content. This content 
 however is nothing but that very revelation, since the 
 character (being reflected in itself to make content) is 
 only a passing stage of the form which passes away in the 
 power of substance. Substantiality is the absolute form- 
 activity and the power of necessity : all content is but 
 a vanishing element which merely belongs to this pro- 
 cess, where there is an absolute revulsion of form and 
 content into one another. 
 
 In the history of philosophy we meet with Substance as 
 the principle of Spinoza's system. On the import and value 
 of that much-praised and no less decried philosophy there 
 has been great misunderstanding and a deal of talking since 
 the days of Spinoza. The atheism and, as a further charge, 
 the pantheism of the system has formed the commonest 
 ground of accusation. These cries arise because of Spinoza's 
 conception of God as substance, and substance only. What 
 we are to think of this charge follows, in the first in- 
 stance, from the place which substance takes in the sys- 
 tem of the logical idea. Though an essential stage in the 
 evolution of the idea, substance is not the same with abso- 
 lute Idea, but the idea under the still limited form of neces- 
 sity. It is true that God is necessity, or, as we may also put 
 it, that He is the absolute Thing : He is however no less the 
 absolute Person. That He is the absolute Person however 
 is a point which the philosophy of Spinoza never reached : 
 and on that side it falls short of the true notion of God 
 which forms the content of religious consciousness in Chris- 
 tianity. Spinoza was by descent a Jew ; and it is upon the 
 whole the Oriental way of seeing things, according to which 
 the nature of the finite world seems frail and transient, that 
 has found its intellectual expression in his system. This 
 
151.] SUBSTANCE AND ACCIDENTS. 275 
 
 Oriental view of the unity of substance certainly gives the 
 basis for all real further development. Still it is not the final 
 idea. It is marked by the absence of the principle of the 
 Western World, the principle of individuality', which first 
 appeared under a philosophic shape, contemporaneously 
 with Spinoza, in the Monadology of Leibnitz, 
 
 From this point we glance back to the alleged atheism of 
 Spinoza. The charge will be seen to be unfounded if we 
 remember that his system, instead of denying God, rather 
 recognises that He alone really is. Nor can it be main- 
 tained that the God of Spinoza, although he is described as 
 alone true, is not the true God, and therefore as good as no 
 God. If that were a just charge, it would only prove that 
 all other systems, where speculation has not gone beyond 
 a subordinate stage of the idea, — that the Jews and Moham- 
 medans who know God onl}' as the Lord,— and that even the 
 many Christians for whom God is merely the most high, 
 unknowable, and transcendent being, are as much atheists 
 as Spinoza. The so-called atheism of Spinoza is merely an 
 exaggeration of the fact that he defrauds the principle of 
 difference or finitude of its due. Hence his system, as it 
 holds that there is properly speaking no world, at any rate 
 that the world has no positive being, should rather be styled 
 Acosmism. These considerations will also show what is to 
 be said of the charge of Pantheism. If Pantheism means, 
 as it often does, the doctrine which takes finite things in 
 their finitude and in the complex of them to be God, we 
 must acquit the system of Spinoza of the crime of Pan- 
 theism. For in that system, finite things and the world as 
 a whole are denied all truth. On the other hand, the 
 philosophy which is Acosmism is for that reason certainly 
 pantheistic. 
 
 The shortcoming thus acknowledged to attach to the con- 
 tent turns out at the same time to be a shortcoming in 
 respect of form. Spinoza puts substance at the head of his 
 system, and defines it to be the unity of thought and exten- 
 sion, without demonstrating how he gets to this distinction, 
 or how he traces it back to the unity of substance. The 
 further treatment of the subject proceeds in what is called 
 
 T 2 
 
276 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [151-153. 
 
 the. mathematical method. Definitions and axioms are first 
 laid down : after them comes a series of theorems, which 
 are proved by an analytical reduction of them to these un- 
 proved postulates. Although the system of Spinoza, and 
 that even by those' who altogether reject its contents and 
 results, is praised for the strict sequence of its method, such 
 unqualified praise of the form is as little justified as an un- 
 qualified rejection of the content. The defect of the content 
 is that the form is not known as immanent in it, and there- 
 fore only approaches it as an outer and subjective form. 
 As intuitively accepted by Spinoza without a previous me- 
 diation by dialectic, Substance, as the universal negative 
 pov/er, is as it were a dark shapeless abyss which engulfs 
 all definite content as radically null, and produces from 
 itself nothing that has a positive subsistence of its own. 
 
 152.] At the stage, where substance, as absolute power, 
 is the self-relating power (itself a merely inner possibility) 
 which thus determines itself to accidentality, — from which 
 power the externality it thereby creates is distinguished 
 — necessity is a correlation strictly so called, just as in 
 the first form of necessity, it is substance. This is the 
 correlation of Causality. 
 
 [b) Relationship of Causality. 
 
 153.] Substance is Cause, in so far as substance re- 
 flects into self as against its passage into accidentality 
 and so stands as the primary fact, but again no less 
 suspends this reflection-into-self (its bare possibility), 
 laj's itself down as the negative of itself, and thus pro- 
 duces an Eflfect, an actuality, which, though so far only 
 assumed as a sequence, is through the process that 
 effectuates it at the same time necessary. 
 
 As primary fact, the cause is qualified as having 
 absolute independence and a siibsistence maintained in 
 face of the effect : but in the necessity, whose identity 
 
153.] CAUSE AND EFFECT. 277 
 
 constitutes that primariness itself, it is wholly passed 
 into the effect. So far again as we can speak of a 
 definite content, there is no content in the effect that 
 is not in the cause. That identity in fact is the absolute 
 content itself: but it is no less also the form-character- 
 istic. The primariness of the cause is suspended in the 
 effect in which the cause makes itself a dependent being. 
 The cause however does not for that reason vanish and 
 leave the effect to be alone actual. F'or this dependency 
 is in like manner directly suspended, and is rather the 
 reflection of the cause in itself, its primariness : in short, 
 it is in the effect that the cause first becomes actual and 
 a cause. The cause consequently is in its full truth 
 causa sui. — Jacobi, sticking to the partial conception of 
 mediation (in his Letters on Spinoza, second edit. p. 416), 
 has treated the causa sui (and the effectus sui is the 
 same), which is the absolute truth of the cause, as a 
 mere formalism. He has also made the remark that 
 God ought to be defined not as the ground of things, 
 but essentially as cause. A more thorough considera- 
 tion of the nature of cause would have shown that 
 Jacobi did not by this means gain what he intended. 
 Even in the finite cause and its conception we can see 
 this identity between cause and effect in point of con- 
 tent. The rain (the cause) and the wet (the effect) are 
 the self-same existing water. In point of form the cause 
 (rain) is dissipated or lost in the effect (wet): but in that 
 case the result can no longer be described as effect; for 
 without the cause it is nothing, and we should have only 
 the unrelated wet left. 
 
 In the common acceptation of the causal relation the 
 cause is finite, to such extent as its content is so (as is 
 also the case with finite substance), and so far as cause 
 and effect are conceived as two several independent exist- 
 ences: which they are, however, only when we leave the 
 
278 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [153. 
 
 causal relation out of sight. In the finite sphere we never 
 get over the difference of the form-characteristics in their 
 relation: and hence we turn the matter round and 
 define the cause also as something dependent or as an 
 effect. This again has another cause, and thus there 
 grows up a progress from effects to causes ad infinitum. 
 There is a descending progress too : the effect, looked 
 at in its identity with the cause, is itself defined as a 
 cause, and at the same time as another cause, which 
 again has other effects, and so on for ever. 
 
 The way understanding bristles up against the idea 
 of substance is equalled by its readiness to use the re- 
 lation of cause and effect. Whenever it is proposed to 
 view any sum of fact as necessary, it is especially the 
 relation of causality to which the reflective understand- 
 ing makes a point of tracing it back. Now, although this 
 relation does undoubtedly belong to necessity, it forms 
 only one aspect in the process of that category. That 
 process equally requires the suspension of the media- 
 tion involved in causality and the exhibition of it as simple 
 self-relation. If we stick to causality as such, we have it 
 not in its truth. Such a causality is merely finite, and its 
 finitude lies in retaining the distinction between cause and 
 effect unassimilated. But these two terms, if they are dis- 
 tinct, are also identical. Even in ordinary consciousness 
 that identity may be found. We say that a cause is a cause, 
 only when it has an effect, and vice versa. Both cause and 
 effect are thus one and the same content : and the distinc- 
 tion between them is primarily only that the one lays down, 
 and the other is laid down. This formal difference however 
 again suspends itself, because the cause is not only a cause 
 of something else, but also a cause of itself ; while the effect 
 is not only an effect of something else, but also an effect of 
 itself. The finitude of things consists accordingly in this. 
 While cause and effect are in their notion identical, the two 
 forms present themselves severed so that, though the cause 
 is also an effect, and the effect also a cause, the cause is not 
 an effect in the same connexion as it is a cause, nor the 
 
153-I54-] CAUSE AND EFFECT. 279 
 
 effect a cause in the same connexion as it is an effect. This 
 again gives the infinite progress, in the shape of an endless 
 series of causes, which shows itself at the same time as an 
 endless series of effects. 
 
 154.] The effect is different from the cause. The 
 former as such has a being dependent on the latter. 
 But such a dependence is likewise reflection-into-self 
 and immediacy : and the action of the cause, as it con- 
 stitutes the effect, is at the same time the pre-constitution 
 of the effect, so long as effect is kept separate from 
 cause. There is thus already in existence another 
 substance on which the effect takes place. As imme- 
 diate, this substance is not a self related negativity and 
 active, but passive. Yet it is a substance, and it is there- 
 fore active also : it therefore suspends the immediacy it 
 was originally put forward with, and the effect which 
 was put into it : it reacts, i. e. suspends the activity of 
 the first substance. But this first substance also in the 
 same way sets aside its own immediacy, or the effect 
 which is put into it ; it thus suspends the activity of the 
 other substance and reacts. In this manner causality 
 passes into the relation of Action and Reaction, or 
 Reciprocity. 
 
 In Reciprocity, although causality is not yet invested 
 with its true characteristic, the rectilinear movement out 
 from causes to effects, and from effects to causes, is bent 
 round and back into itself, and thus the progress ad in- 
 finitum of causes and effects is, as a progress, really and 
 truly suspended. This bend, which transforms the in- 
 finite progression into a self-contained relationship, is 
 here as always the plain reflection that in the above 
 meaningless repetition there is only one and the same 
 thing, viz. one cause and another, and their connexion 
 with one another. Reciprocity — which is the develop- 
 ment of this relation -itself however only distinguishes 
 
28o THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [154-156. 
 
 turn and turn about ( — not causes, but) factors of causa- 
 tion, in each of which — just because they are inseparable 
 (on the principle of the identity that the cause is cause 
 in the effect, and vice versa) — the other factor is also 
 equally supposed. 
 
 (c) Reciprocity or Action and Reaction. 
 
 155.] The characteristics which in Reciprocal Action 
 are retained as distinct are (a) potentially the same. 
 The one side is a cause, is primary, active, passive, &c., 
 just as the other is. Similarly the pre-supposition of 
 another side and the action upon it, the immediate 
 primariness and the dependence produced by the alter- 
 nation, are one and the same on both sides. The cause 
 assumed to be first is on account of its immediacy 
 passive, a dependent being, and an effect. The dis- 
 tinction of the causes spoken of as two is accordingly 
 void : and properly speaking there is only one cause, 
 which, while it suspends itself (as substance) in its effect, 
 also rises in this operation only to independent exist- 
 ence as a cause. 
 
 156.] But this unity of the double cause is also [ii) 
 actual. All this alternation is properly the cause in act 
 of constituting itself and in such constitution lies its 
 being. The nullity of the distinctions is not only po- 
 tential, or a reflection of ours (§ 155). Reciprocal 
 action just means that each characteristic we impose is 
 also to be suspended and inverted into its opposite, and 
 that in this way the essential nullity of the 'moments * is 
 explicitly stated. An effect is introduced into the pri- 
 mariness; in other words, the primariness is abolished : 
 the action of a cause becomes reaction, and so on. 
 
 Reciprocal action realises the causal relation in its com- 
 plete development. It is this relation, therefore, in which 
 reflection usually takes shelter when the conviction grows that 
 
156.] ACTION AND REACTION. 2&1 
 
 things can no longer be studied satisfactorily from a causal 
 point of view, on account of the infinite progress already 
 spoken of. Thus in historical research the question may 
 be raised in a first form, whether the character and manners 
 of a nation are the cause of its constitution and its laws, or 
 if they are not rather the effect. Then, as the second step, 
 the character and manners on one side and the constitu- 
 tion and laws on the other are conceived on the principle 
 of reciprocity : and in that case the cause in the same 
 connexion as it is a cause will at the same time be an effect, 
 and vice versa. The same thing is done in the study of 
 Nature, and especially of living organisms. There the 
 several organs and functions are similarly seen to stand to 
 each other in the relation of reciprocity. Reciprocity is un- 
 doubtedly the proximate truth of the relation of cause and 
 effect, and stands, so to say, on the threshold of the notion ; 
 but on that very ground, supposing that our aim is a 
 thoroughly comprehensive idea, we should not rest content 
 with applying this relation. If we get no further than study- 
 ing a given content under the point of view of reciprocity, 
 we are taking up an attitude which leaves matters utterly 
 incomprehensible. We are left with a mere dry fact ; and 
 the call for mediation, which is the chief motive in applying 
 ^he relation of causality, is still unanswered. And if we 
 look more narrowly into the dissatisfaction felt in applying 
 the relation of reciprocity, we shall see that it consists in the 
 circumstance, that this relation, instead of being treated as an 
 equivalent for the notion, ought, first of all, to be known and 
 understood in its own nature. And to understand the rela- 
 tion of action and reaction we must not let the two sides rest 
 in their state of mere given facts, but recognise them, as has 
 been shown in the two paragraphs preceding, for factors of 
 a third and higher, which is the notion and nothing else. 
 To make, for example, the manners of the Spartans the 
 cause of their constitution and their constitution conversely 
 the cause of their manners, may no doubt be in a way cor- 
 rect. But, as we have comprehended neither the manners 
 nor the constitution of the nation, the result of such reflec- 
 tions can never be final or satisfactory. The satisfactory 
 
282 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [156-158, 
 
 point will be reached only when these two, as well as all 
 other, special aspects of Spartan life and Spartan history are 
 seen to be founded in this notion. 
 
 157.] This pure self-reciprocation is therefore Neces- 
 sity unveiled or realised. The link of necessity qua 
 necessity is identity, as still inward and concealed, 
 because it is the identity of what are esteemed actual 
 things, although their very self-su"bsistence is bound to 
 be necessity. The circulation of substance through 
 causality and reciprocity therefore only expressly makes 
 out or states that self-subsistence is the infinite negative 
 self- relation — a relation negative, in general, for in it the 
 act of distinguishing and intermediating becomes a pri- 
 mariness of actual things independent one against the 
 other, — and infinite self -relation, because their indepen- 
 dence only lies in their identity. 
 
 158.] This truth of necessity, therefore, is Freedom : 
 and the truth of substance is the Notion, — an indepen- 
 dence which, though self-repulsive into distinct inde- 
 pendent elements, yet in that repulsion is self-identical, 
 and in the movement of reciprocity still at home and 
 conversant only with itself. 
 
 Necessity is often called hard, and rightly so, if we keep 
 only to necessity as such, i. e. to its immediate shape. Here 
 we have, first of all, some state or, generally speaking, 
 fact, possessing an independent subsistence : and necessity 
 primarily implies that there falls upon such a fact something 
 else by which it is brought low. This is what is hard and 
 sad in necessity immediate or abstract. The identity of the 
 two things, which necessity presents as bound to each other 
 and thus bereft of their independence, is at first only inward, 
 and therefore has no existence for those under the yoke of 
 necessity. Freedom too from this point of view is only ab- 
 stract, and is preserved only by renouncing all that we 
 immediately are and have. But, as we have seen already, 
 
158-159] NECESSITY AND FREEDOM. 283 
 
 the process of necessity is so directed that it overcomes 
 the rigid externality which it first had and reveals its 
 inward nature. It then appears that the members, linked 
 to one another, are not really foreign to each other, but only 
 elements of one whole, each of them, in its connexion with 
 the other, being, as it were, at home, and combining with 
 itself. In this way necessity is transfigured into freedom, 
 — not the freedom that consists in abstract negation, but free- 
 dom concrete and positive. From which we may learn 
 what a mistake it is to regard freedom and necessity as 
 mutually exclusive. Necessity indeed qtui necessity is far 
 from being freedom : yet freedom pre-supposes necessity, 
 and contains it as an unsubstantial element in itself. A good 
 man is aware that the tenor of his conduct is essentially 
 obligatory and necessary. But this consciousness is so far 
 from making an}' abatement from his freedom, that without 
 it real and reasonable freedom could not be distinguished 
 from arbitrary choice, — a freedom which has no reality and 
 is merely potential. A criminal, when punished, may look 
 upon his punishment as a restriction of his freedom. Really 
 the punishment is not foreign constraint to which he is sub- 
 jected, but the manifestation of his own act: and if he recog- 
 nises this, he comports himself as a free man. In short, 
 man is most independent when he knows himself to be 
 determined by the absolute idea throughout. It was this 
 phase of mind and conduct which Spinoza called Amor 
 intellectualis Dei. 
 
 159.] Thus the Notion is the truth of Being and 
 Essence, inasmuch as the shining or show of self- 
 reflection is itself at the same time independent im- 
 mediacy, and this being of a different actuality is im- 
 mediately only a shining or show on itself. 
 
 The Notion has exhibited itself as the truth of Being 
 and Essence, as the ground to which the regress of 
 both leads. Conversely it has been developed out of 
 being as its ground. The former aspect of the advance 
 may be regarded as a concentration of being into its 
 
284 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [159. 
 
 depth, thereby disclosing its inner nature : the latter 
 aspect as an issuing of the more perfect from the less 
 perfect. When such development is viewed on the 
 .latter side only, it does prejudice to the method of 
 philosophy. The special meaning which these super- 
 ficial thoughts of more imperfect and more perfect have 
 in this place is to indicate the distinction of being, as an 
 immediate unity with itself, from the notion, as free 
 mediation with itself. Since being has shown that it 
 is an element in the notion, the latter has thus exhibited 
 itself as the truth of being. As this its reflection in 
 itself and as an absorption of the mediation, the notion 
 is the pre-supposition of the immediate — a pre-sup- 
 position which is identical with the return to self; and 
 in this identity lie freedom and the notion. If the 
 partial element therefore be called the imperfect, then 
 the notion, or the perfect, is certainly a development 
 from the imperfect ; since its very nature is tlius to 
 suspend its pre-supposition. At the same time it 
 is the notion alone which, in the act of supposing 
 itself, makes its pre-supposition ; as has been made 
 apparent in causality in general and especially in re- 
 ciprocal action. 
 
 Thus in reference to Being and Essence the Notion 
 is defined as Essence reverted to the simple immediacy 
 of Being, — the shining or show of Essence thereby hav- 
 ing actuality, and its actuality being at the same time 
 a free shining or show in itself. In this manner the 
 notion has being as its simple self-relation, or as the 
 immediacy of its immanent unity. Being is so poor 
 a category that it is the least thing which can be shown 
 to be found in the notion. 
 
 The passage from necessity to freedom, or from 
 actuality into the notion, is the very hardest, because it 
 proposes that independent actuality shall be thought as 
 
T59-] NECESSITY AND FREEDOM 285 
 
 having all its substantiality in the passing over and iden- 
 tity with the other independent actuality. The notion, 
 too, is extremely hard, because it is itself just this very 
 identity. But the actual substance as such, the cause, 
 which in its exclusiveness resists all invasion, is ipso facto 
 subjected to necessity or the destiny of passing into de- 
 pendency : and it is this subjection rather where the 
 chief hardness lies. To think necessity, on the con- 
 trary, rather tends to melt that hardness. For thinking 
 means that, in the other, one meets with one's self. — 
 It means a liberation, which is not the flight of ab- 
 straction, but consists in that which is actual having 
 itself not as something else, but as its own being and 
 creation, in the other actuality with which it is bound 
 up by the force of necessity. As existing in an in- 
 dividual form, this liberation is called I : as developed 
 to its totality, it is free Spirit ; as feeling, it is Love ; 
 and as enjoyment, it is Blessedness. — The great vision 
 of substance in Spinoza is only a potential liberation 
 from finite exclusiveness and egoism : but the notion 
 itself realises for its own both the power of necessity 
 and actual freedom. 
 
 When, as now, the notion is called the truth of Being and 
 Essence, we must expect to be asked, why we do not begin 
 with the notion ? The answer is that, where knowledge by 
 thought is our aim, we cannot begin with the truth, because 
 the truth, when it forms the beginning, must rest on mere 
 assertion. The truth when it is thought must as such 
 verify itself to thought. If the notion were put at the head 
 of Logic, and defined, quite correctly in point of content, as 
 the unity of Being and Essence, the following question would 
 come up : What are we to think under the terms ' Being ' 
 and 'Essence,' and how do they come to be embraced in 
 the unity of the Notion ? But if we answered these ques- 
 tions, then our beginning with the notion would be merely 
 nominal. The real start would be made with Being, as we 
 
286 THE DOCTRINE OF ESSENCE. [159. 
 
 have here done : with this diiference, that the characteristics 
 of Being as well as those of Essence would have to be ac- 
 cepted uncritically from figurate conception, whereas we 
 have observed Being and Essence in their own dialectical 
 development and learnt how they lose themselves in the 
 unity of the notion. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THIRD SUB-DIVISION OF LOGIC. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. 
 
 160.] The Notion is the principle of freedom, the 
 power of substance self-reaHsed. It is a systematic 
 whole, in which each of its constituent functions is 
 the very total which the notion is, and is put as in- 
 dissolubly one with it. Thus in its self-identity it has 
 original and complete determinateness. 
 
 The position taken up by the notion is that of absolute 
 idealism. Philosophy is a knowledge through notions be- 
 cause it sees that what on other grades of consciousness is 
 taken to have Being, and to be naturally or immediately 
 independent, is but a constituent stage in the Idea. In the 
 logic of understanding, the notion is generally reckoned a 
 mere form of thought, and treated as a general conception. 
 It is to this inferior view of the notion that the assertion 
 refers, so often urged on behalf of the heart and sentiment, 
 that notions as such are something dead, empty, and ab- 
 stract. The case is really quite the reverse. The notion is, on 
 the contrary, the principle of all life, and thus possesses at 
 the same time a character of thorough concreteness. That 
 it is so follows from the whole logical movement up to this 
 point, and need not be here proved. The contrast between 
 form and content, which is thus used to criticise the notion 
 when it is alleged to be merely formal, has, like all the other 
 contrasts upheld by reflection, been already left behind and 
 overcome dialecticaliy or through itself The notion, in 
 short, is what contains all the earlier categories of thought 
 merged in it. It certainly is a form, but an infinite and 
 
288 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [i6o-i6r. 
 
 creative form, which includes, but at the same time releases 
 from itself, the fulness of all content. And so too the notion 
 may, if it be wished, be styled abstract, if the name concrete 
 is restricted to the concrete facts of sense or of immediate 
 perception. For the notion is not palpable to the touch, 
 and when we are engaged with it, hearing and seeing must 
 quite fail us. And yet, as it was before remarked, the no- 
 tion is a true concrete ; for the reason that it involves Being 
 and Essence, and the total wealth of these two spheres with 
 them, merged in the unity of thought. 
 
 If, as was said at an earlier point, the different stages of 
 the logical idea are to be treated as a series of definitions of 
 the Absolute, the definition which now results for us is that 
 the Absolute is the Notion. That necessitates a higher 
 estimate of the notion, however, than is found in formal 
 conceptualist Logic, where the notion is a mere form of 
 our subjective thought, with no original content of its own. 
 But if Speculative Logic thus attaches a meaning to the 
 term notion so very different from that usually given, it may 
 be asked why the same word should be employed in two 
 contrary acceptations, and an occasion thus given for con- 
 fusion and misconception. The answer is that, great as the 
 interval is between the speculative notion and the notion of 
 Formal Logic, a closer examination shows that the deeper 
 meaning is not so foreign to the general usages of language 
 as it seems at first sight. We speak of the deduction of a 
 content from the notion, e.g. of the specific provisions of the 
 law of property from the notion of property ; and so again 
 we speak of tracing back these material details to the notion. 
 We thus recognise that the notion is no mere form without 
 a content of its own : for if it were, there would be in the 
 one case nothing to deduce from such a form, and in the 
 other case to trace a given body of fact back to the empty 
 form of the notion would only rob the fact of its specific 
 character, without making it understood. 
 
 161.] The onward movement of the notion is no 
 longer either a transition into, or a reflection on some- 
 thing else, but Development. For in the notion, the 
 
i6i.] DEVELOPMENT. 289 
 
 elements distinguished are without more ado at the 
 same time declared to be identical with one another 
 and with the whole, and the specific character of each 
 is a free being of the whole notion. 
 
 Transition into something else is the dialectical process 
 within the range of Being : reflection (bringing something 
 else into light), in the range of Essence. The movement of 
 the Notion is development: by which that only is explicit 
 which is already implicitly present. In the world of nature 
 it is organic life that corresponds to the grade of the notion. 
 Thus e.g. the plant is developed from its germ. The germ 
 virtually involves the whole plant, but does so only ideally 
 or in thought : and it would therefore be a mistake to regard 
 the development of the root, stem, leaves, and other different 
 parts of the plant, as meaning that they were realiter pre- 
 sent, but in a very minute form, in the germ. That is the 
 so-called ' box-within-box ' hypothesis ; a theory which 
 commits the mistake of supposing an actual existence of 
 what is at first found only as a postulate of the completed 
 thought. The truth of the hvpothesis on the other hand 
 Ues in its perceiving that in the process of development the 
 notion keeps to itself and only gives rise to alteration of 
 form, without making any addition in point of content. It 
 is this nature of the notion— this manifestation of itself in its 
 process as a development of its own self,— which is chiefly 
 in view with those who speak of innate ideas, or who, 
 like Plato, describe all learning merely as reminiscence. Of 
 course that again does not mean that everything which is 
 embodied in a mind, after that mind has been formed by 
 instruction, had been present in that mind beforehand, in 
 its definitely expanded shape. 
 
 The movement of the notion is as it were to be looked 
 upon merely as play : the other which it sets up is in 
 reality not an other. Or, as it is expressed in the teaching 
 of Christianity : not merely has God created a world which 
 confronts Him as an other ; He has also from all eternity 
 begotten a Son in whom He, a Spirit, is at home with 
 Himself. 
 
 VOL. n. U 
 
290 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [162. 
 
 162.] The doctrine of the notion is divided into three 
 parts, (i) The first is the doctrine of the Subjective 
 or Formal Notion. (2) The second is the doctrine of 
 the notion invested with the character of immediacy, or 
 of Objectivity. (3) The third is the doctrine of the 
 Idea, the subject-object, the unity of notion and ob- 
 jectivity, the absolute truth. 
 
 The Common Logic covers only the matters which 
 come before us here as a portion of the third part of 
 the whole system, together with the so-called Laws of 
 Thought, which we have already met ; and in the Ap- 
 plied Logic it adds a little about cognition. This is 
 combined with psychological, metaphysical, and all sorts 
 of empirical materials, which were introduced because, 
 when all was done, those forms of thought could not 
 be made to do all that was required of them. But with 
 these additions the science lost its unity of aim. Then 
 there was a further circumstance against the Common 
 Logic. Those forms, which at least do belong to the 
 proper domain of Logic, are supposed to be categories 
 of conscious thought only, of thought too in the character 
 of understanding, not of reason. 
 
 The preceding logical categories, those viz. of Being 
 and Essence, are, it is true, no mere logical modes or 
 entities : they are proved to be notions in their trans- 
 ition or their dialectical element, and in their return into 
 themselves and totality. But they are only in a modified 
 form notions (cp. §§ 84 and 112), notions rudimentary, 
 or, what is the same thing, notions for us. The anti- 
 thetical term into which each category passes, or in 
 which it shines, so producing correlation, is not charac- 
 terised as a particular. The third, in which they return 
 to unity, is not characterised as a subject or an indi- 
 vidual : nor is there any explicit statement that the cate- 
 gory is identical in its antithesis,— in other words, its 
 
i6a-i63.1 SUBJECTIVE NOTION. 29I 
 
 freedom is not expressly stated : and all this because the 
 category is not universality, — What generally passes 
 current under the name of a notion is a mode of under- 
 standing, or, even, a mere general representation^ and 
 therefore, in rhort, a finite mode of thought (cp. § 62). 
 
 The Logic of the Notion is usually treated as a science 
 of form only, and understood to deal with the form of 
 notion, judgment, and syllogism as form, without in the 
 least touching the question whether an^'thing is true. 
 The answer to that question is supposed to depend on 
 the content only. If the logical forms of the notion 
 were really dead and inert receptacles of conceptions 
 and thoughts, careless of what they contained, know- 
 ledge about them would be an idle curiosity which the 
 truth might dispense with. On the contrary they 
 really are, as forms of the notion, the vital spirit of the 
 actual world. That only is true of the actual which is 
 true in virtue of these forms, through them and in them. 
 As yet, however, the truth of these forms has never 
 been considered or examined on their own account any 
 more than their necessary interconnexion. 
 
 A. — The Subjective Notion. 
 [a) The Notion as Notion. 
 163.] The Notion as Notion contains the three fol- 
 lowing 'moments* or functional parts, (i) The first is 
 Universality— meaning that it is in free equality with 
 itself in its specific character. (2) The second is Parti- 
 cularity — that is, the specific character, in which the uni- 
 versal continues serenely equal to itself. (3) The third 
 is Individuality — meaning the reflection-into-self of the 
 specific characters of universality and particularity ; 
 — which negative self-unity has complete and original 
 determinateness, without any loss to its self-identity or 
 universality. 
 
292 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [163. 
 
 Individual and actual are the same thing : only the 
 former has issued from the notion, and is thus, as a 
 universal, stated expressly as a negative identity with 
 itself. The actual, because it is at first no more than a 
 potential or immediate unity of essence and existence, 
 may possibly have effect : but the iadividuality of the 
 notion is the very source of effectiveness, effective more- 
 over no longer as the cause is, with a show of effecting 
 something else, but effective of itself. — Individuality, 
 however, is not to be understood to mean the immediate 
 or natural individual, as when we speak of individual 
 things or individual men : for that special phase of 
 individuality does not appear till we come to the judg- 
 ment. Every function and 'moment' of the notion is 
 itself the whole notion (§ 160).; but the individual or 
 subject is the notion expressly put as a totality. 
 
 (i) The notion is generally associated in our minds with 
 abstract generality, and on that account it is often described 
 as a general conception. We speak, accordingly, of the 
 notions of colour, plant, animal, &c. They are supposed 
 to be arrived at by neglecting the particular features which 
 distinguish the different colours, plants, and animals from 
 each other, and by retaining those common to them all. 
 This is the aspect of the notion which is familiar to under- 
 standing ; and feeling is in the right when it stigmatises 
 such hollow and empty notions as mere phantoms and 
 shadows. But the universal of the notion is not a mere 
 sum of features common to several things, confronted b}?- a 
 particular which enjo3'S an existence of its own. It is, on 
 the contrary, self-particularising or self-specifying, and with 
 undimmed clearness finds itself at home in its antithesis. 
 For the sake both of cognition and of our practical conduct, 
 it is of the utmost importance that the real universal should 
 not be confused with what is merely held in common. All 
 those charges which the devotees of feeling make against 
 thought, and especially against philosophic thought, and 
 the reiterated statement that it is dangerous to carry thought 
 
163.] THE NOTION AS UNIVERSAL. 293 
 
 to what they call too great lengths, originate in the confusion 
 of these two things. 
 
 The universal in its true and comprehensive meaning is a 
 thought which, as we know, cost thousands of years to make 
 it enter into the consciousness of men. The thought did 
 not gain its full recognition till the days of Christianity. The 
 Greeks, in other respects so advanced, knew neither God 
 nor even man in their true universality. The gods of the 
 Greeks were only particular powers of the mind ; and the 
 universal God, the God of all nations, was to the Athenians 
 still a God concealed. They believed in the same way that 
 an absolute gulf separated themselves from the barbarians. 
 Man as man was not then recognised to be of infinite worth 
 and to have infinite rights. The question has been asked, 
 why slavery has vanished from modern Europe. One 
 special circumstance after another has been adduced in 
 explanation of this phenomenon. But the real ground why 
 there are no more slaves in Christian Europe is only to be 
 found in the very principle of Christianit}^ itself, the religion 
 of absolute freedom. Only in Christendom is man respected 
 as man, in his infinitude and universality. What the slave 
 is without, is the recognition that he is a person : and the 
 principle of personality is universality. The master looks 
 upon his slave not as a person, but as a selfless thing. The 
 slave is not himself reckoned an 'I'; — his *I' is his 
 master. 
 
 The distinction referred to above between what is merely 
 in common, and what is truly universal, is strikingly ex- 
 pressed by Rousseau in his famous ' Contrat Social,' when 
 he says that the laws of a state must spring from the 
 universal will [volonte ge'ne'rale), but need not on that account 
 be the will of all {volonte de tous). Rousseau would have 
 made a sounder contribution towards a theory of the state, 
 if he had always keep this distinction in sight. The general 
 will is the notion of the will : and the laws are the special 
 clauses of this will and based upon the notion of it. 
 
 (2) We add a remark upon the account of the origin and 
 formation of notions which is usually given in the Logic of 
 Understanding. It is not vce who frame the notions. The 
 
294 ^^^ DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [163-164. 
 
 notion is not something which is originated at all. No 
 doubt the notion is not mere Being, or the immediate : it 
 involves mediation, but the mediation lies in itself. In other 
 words, the notion is what is mediated through itself and 
 with itself. It is a mistake to imagine that the objects 
 which form the content of our mental ideas come first 
 and that our subjective agency then supervenes, and by 
 the aforesaid operation of abstraction, and by colligating 
 the points possessed in common by the objects, frames 
 notions of them. Rather the notion is the genuine first; and 
 things are what they are through the action of the notion, 
 immanent in them, and revealing itself in them. In re- 
 ligious language we express this by saying that God created 
 the world out of nothing. In other words, the world and 
 finite things have issued from the fulness of the divine 
 thoughts and the divine decrees. Thus religion recognises 
 thought and (more exactly) the notion to be the infinite 
 form, or the free creative activity, which can realise itself 
 without the help of a matter that exists outside it. 
 
 164.] The notion is concrete out and out : because the 
 negative unity with itself, as characterisation pure and 
 entire, which is individuality, is just what constitutes 
 its self-relation, its universality. The functions or 
 ' moments * of the notion are to this extent indissoluble. 
 The categories of 'reflection' are expected to be severally 
 apprehended and separately accepted as current, apart 
 from their opposites. But in the notion, where their 
 identity is expressly assumed, each of its functions can 
 be immediately apprehended only from and with the 
 rest. 
 
 Universality, particularity, and individuality are, taken 
 in the abstract, the same as identity, difference, and 
 ground. But the universal is the self-identical, with the 
 express qualification, that it simultaneously contains the 
 particular and the individual. Again, the particular is 
 the different or the specific character, but with the 
 qualification that it is in itself universal and is as an 
 
164.] MOMENTS OF THE NOTION. 295 
 
 individual. Similarly- the individual must be understood 
 to be a subject or substratum, which involves the genus 
 and species in itself and possesses a substantial exist- 
 ence. Such is the explicit or realised inseparability of 
 the functions of the notion in their difference (§ 160)— 
 what may be called the clearness of the notion, in which 
 each distinction causes no dimness or interruption, but 
 is quite as much transparent. 
 
 No complaint is oftener made against the notion than 
 that it is abstract Of course it is abstract, if abstract 
 means that the medium in which the notion -exists is 
 thought in general and not the sensible thing in its 
 empirical concreteness. It is abstract also, because the 
 notion falls short of the idea. To this extent the sub- 
 jective notion is still formal. This however does not 
 mean that it ought to have or receive another content 
 than its own. It is itself the absolute form, and so is all 
 specific character, but as that character is in its truth. 
 Although it be abstract therefore, it is the concrete, con- 
 crete altogether, the subject as such. The absolutely 
 concrete is the mind (see end of § 159)— the notion when 
 it exists as notion distinguishing itself from its objectivity, 
 which notwithstanding the distinction still continues to 
 be its own. Everything else which is concrete, however 
 rich it be, is not so intensely identical with itself and 
 therefore not so concrete on its own part, — least of all 
 what is commonly supposed to be concrete, but is only 
 a congeries held together by external influence. — 
 What are called notions, and in fact specific notions, 
 such as man, house, animal, &c., are simply denotations 
 and abstract representations. These abstractions re- 
 tain out of all the functions of the notion only that of 
 universality; they leave particularity and individuality 
 out of account and have no development in these 
 directions. By so doing they just miss the notion. 
 
296 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [165. 
 
 165.] It is the element of Individuality which first 
 explicitly differentiates the elements of the notion. In- 
 dividuality is the negative reflection of the notion into 
 itself, and it is in that way at first the free differentiating 
 of it as the first negation, by which the specific character 
 of the notion is realised, but under the form of particu- 
 larity. That is to say, the different elements are in 
 the first place only qualified as the several elements 
 of the notion, and, secondly, their identity is no less 
 explicitly stated, the one being said to be the other. 
 This realised particularity of the notion is the Judgment. 
 
 The ordinary classification of notions, as clear, distinct 
 and adequate, is no part of the notion ; it belongs to 
 psychology. Notions, in fact, are here synonymous 
 with mental representations ; a clear notion is an abstract 
 simple representation : a distinct notion is one where, 
 in addition to the simplicity, there is one 'mark' or 
 character emphasised as a sign for subjective cognition. 
 There is no more striking mark of the formalism and 
 decay of Logic than the favourite category of the 'mark.' 
 The adequate notion comes nearer the notion proper, or 
 even the Idea : but after all it expresses only the formal 
 circumstance that a notion or representation agrees 
 with its object, that is, with an external thing. — The 
 division into what are called subordinate and co-ordinate 
 notions implies a mechanical distinction of universal 
 from particular, which allows only a mere correlation of 
 them in external comparison. Again, an enumeration 
 of such kinds as contrary and contradictory, affirmative 
 and negative notions, &c., is only a chance-directed 
 gleaning of logical forms which properly belong to the 
 sphere of Being or Essence, (where they have been 
 already examined,) and which have nothing to do with 
 the specific notional character as such. The true dis- 
 tinctions in the notion, universal, particular, and in- 
 
165-166.] JUDGMENT. 297 
 
 dividual, may be said also to constitute species of it, but 
 only when they are kept severed from each other by 
 external reflection. The immanent differentiating and 
 specifying of the notion come to sight in the judgment: 
 for to judge is to specify the notion. 
 
 (b) The Judgment. 
 
 166.] The Judgment is the notion in its particularity, 
 as a connexion which is also a distinguishing of its 
 functions, which are put as independent and yet as 
 identical with themselves, not with one another. 
 
 One's first impression about the Judgment is the in- 
 dependence of the two extremes, the subject and the 
 predicate. The former we take to be a thing or term 
 per se, and the predicate a general term outside the said 
 subject and somewhere in our heads. The next point 
 is for us to bring the latter into combination with the 
 former, and in this way frame a Judgment. The copula 
 ' is ' however enunciates the predicate 0/ the subject, 
 and so that external subjective eubsumption is again 
 put in abeyance, and the Judgment taken as a deter- 
 mination of the object itself. — The etymological meaning 
 of the Judgment {Urtheil) in German goes deeper, as it 
 were declaring the unity of the notion to be primary, 
 and its distinction to be the original partition. And 
 that is what the Judgment really is. 
 
 In its abstract terms a Judgment is expressible in the 
 proposition: 'The individual is the universal.' These 
 are the terms under which the subject and the predi- 
 cate first confront each other, when the functions of the 
 notion are taken in their immediate character or first 
 abstraction, [Propositions such as, ' The particular is 
 the universal,' and 'The individual is the particular,' 
 belong to the further specialisation of the judgment,] It 
 
298 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [166. 
 
 shows a strange want of observation in the logic-books, 
 that in none of them is the fact stated, that in every 
 judgment there is such a statement made, as, The indi- 
 vidual is the universal, or still more definitely. The sub- 
 ject is the predicate : {e.g. God is absolute spirit). No 
 doubt there is also a distinction between terms like 
 individual and universal, subject and predicate : but it 
 is none the less the universal fact, that every judgment 
 states them to be identical. 
 
 The copula ' is ' springs from the nature of the notion, 
 to be self-identical even in parting with its own. The in- 
 dividual and universal are its constituents, and therefore 
 characters which cannot be isolated. The earlier cate- 
 gories (of reflection) in their correlations also refer to 
 one another: but their interconnexion is only 'having' 
 and not 'being,' i.e. it is not the identity which is 
 realised as identity or universality. In the judgment, 
 therefore, for the first time there is seen the genuine 
 particularity of the notion : for it is the speciality or 
 distinguishing of the latter, without thereby losing 
 universality. 
 
 Judgments are generally looked upon as combinations of 
 notions, and, be it added, of heterogeneous notions. This 
 theory of judgment is correct, so far as it implies that it is 
 the notion which forms the presupposition of the judgment, 
 and which in the judgment comes up under the form of 
 difference. But on the other hand, it is false to speak of 
 notions differing in kind. The notion, although concrete, is 
 still as a notion essentially one, and the functions which it 
 contains are not different kinds of it. It is equally false to 
 speak of a combination of the two sides in the judgment, if 
 we understand the term 'combination' to imply the inde- 
 pendent existence of the combining members apart from the 
 combination. The same external view of their nature is 
 more forcibly apparent when judgments are described as 
 produced by the ascription of a predicate to the subject. 
 
166-167.] JUDGMENT. 299 
 
 Language like this looks upon the subject as self-subsistent 
 outside, and the predicate as found somewhere in our head. 
 Such a conception of the relation between subject and 
 predicate however is at once contradicted by the copula ' is.' 
 By saying 'This rose is red,' or 'This picture is beautiful,' 
 we declare, that it is not we who from outside attach beauty 
 to the picture or redness to the rose, but that these are the 
 characteristics proper to these objects. An additional fault 
 in the way in which Formal Logic conceives the judgment 
 is, that it makes the judgment look as if it were something 
 merely contingent, and does not offer any proof for the 
 advance from notion on to judgment. For the notion does 
 not, as understanding supposes, stand still in its own immo- 
 bility. It is rather an infinite form, of boundless activity, as 
 it were the pimctum saliens of all vitality, and thereby self- 
 differentiating. This disruption of the notion into the differ- 
 ence of its constituent functions, — a disruption imposed by 
 the native act of the notion, is the judgment. A judgment 
 therefore means th.> particularising of the notion. No doubt 
 the notion is implicitly the particular. But in the notion as 
 notion the particular is not yet explicit, and still remains in 
 transparent unity with the universal. Thus, for example, as 
 we remarked before (§ 160, note), the germ of a plant 
 contains its particular, such as root, branches, leaves, &c. : 
 but these details are at first present only potentially, and are 
 not realised till the germ uncloses. This unclosing is, as it 
 were, the judgment of the plant. The illustration may also 
 serve to show how neither the notion nor the judgment are 
 merelj' found in our head, or merely framed by us. The 
 notion is the very heart of things, and makes them what they 
 are. To form a notion of an object means therefore to 
 become aware of its notion : and when we proceed to a 
 criticism or judgment of the object, we are not performing a 
 subjective act, and merely ascribing this or that predicate to 
 the object. We are, on the contrary, observing the object in 
 the specific character imposed by its notion. 
 
 167.] The Judgment is usually taken in a subjective 
 sense as an operation and a form, occurring merely in 
 self-conscious thought. This distinction, however, has no 
 
300 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [167-168. 
 
 existence on purely logical principles, by which the 
 judgment is taken in the quite universal signification 
 that all things are a judgment. That is to say, they are 
 individuals, which are a universality or inner nature in 
 themselves, — a universal which is individualised. Their 
 universality and individuality are distinguished, but the 
 one is at the same time identical with the other. 
 
 The interpretation of the judgment, according to 
 which it is assumed to be merely subjective, as if we 
 ascribed a predicate to a subject, is contradicted by the 
 decidedly objective expression of the judgment. The 
 rose is red ; Gold is a metal. It is not by us that some- 
 thing is first ascribed to them. — A judgment is however 
 distinguished from a proposition. The latter contains 
 a statement about the subject, which does not stand to 
 it in any universal relationship, but expresses some 
 single action, or some state, or the like. Thus, ' Caesar 
 was born at Rome in such and such a year, waged war 
 in Gaul for ten years, crossed the Rubicon, &c.,' are 
 propositions, but not judgments. Again it is absurd to 
 say that such statements as^ 'I slept well last night,' or 
 ' Present arms ! ' may be turned into the form of a judg- 
 ment. * A carriage is passing by ' — would be a judgment, 
 and a subjective one at best, only if it were doubtful, 
 whether the passing object was a carriage, or whether it 
 and not rather the point of observation was in motion : 
 — in short, only if it were desired to specify a conception 
 which was still short of appropriate specification. 
 
 168.] The judgment is an expression of finitude. 
 Things from its point of view are said to be finite, 
 because they are a judgment, because their definite 
 being and their universal nature, (their body and their 
 soul,) though united indeed (otherwise the things would 
 be nothing), are still elements in the constitution which 
 are already different and also in any case separable. 
 
169-170.] JUDGMENT. 301 
 
 169.] The abstract terms of the judgment, 'The in- 
 dividual is the universal/ present the subject (as nega- 
 tively self-relating) as what is immediately concrete, 
 w^hile the predicate is what is abstract, indeterminate, in 
 short, the universal. But the two elements are connected 
 together by an 'is': and thus the predicate (in its 
 universality) must also contain the speciality of the 
 subject, must, in short, have particularity : and so is 
 realised the identity between subject and predicate ; 
 which, being thus unaffected by this difference in form, 
 is the content. 
 
 It is the predicate which first gives the subject, which 
 till then was on its own account a bare mental repre- 
 sentation or an empty name, its specific character and 
 content. In judgments like 'God is the most real of 
 all things,' or 'The Absolute is the self-identical,' God 
 and the Absolute are mere names ; what they are we 
 only learn in the predicate. What the subject may be 
 in other respects, as a concrete thing, is no concern of 
 this judgment. (Cp. § 31.) 
 
 To define the subject as that of which something is said, 
 and the predicate as what is said about it, is mere trifling. 
 It gives no information about the distinction between the 
 two. In point of thought, the subject is primarily the in- 
 dividual, and the predicate the universal. As the judgment 
 receives further development, the subject ceases to be 
 merely the immediate individual, and the predicate merely 
 the abstract universal : the former acquires the additional 
 significations of particular and universal,— the latter the 
 additional significations of particular and individual. Thus 
 while the same names are given to the two terms of the 
 judgment, their meaning passes through a series of changes. 
 
 170.] We now go closer into the speciality of sub- 
 ject and predicate. The subject as negative self-rela- 
 tion (§§ 163, 166) is the stable substratum in which the 
 predicate has its subsistence and where it is ideally 
 
302 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [170- 171. 
 
 present. The predicate, as the phrase is, inheres in the 
 subject. Further, as the subject is in general and 
 immediately concrete, the specific connotation of the 
 predicate is only one of the numerous characters of the 
 subject. Thus the subject is ampler and wider than the 
 predicate. 
 
 Conversely, the predicate as universal is self-sub 
 sistent, and indifferent whether this subject is or not 
 The predicate outflanks the subject, subsuming it under 
 itself: and hence on its side is wider than the subject 
 The specific content of the predicate (§ i6_>) alone con 
 stitutes the identity of the two. 
 
 171.] At first, subject, predicate, and the specific con 
 tent or the identity are, even in their relation, still pu 
 in the judgment as different and divergent. By implica 
 tion, however, that is, in their notion, they are identical 
 For the subject is a concrete totality, — which means no*^ 
 any indefinite multiplicity, but individuality alone, the 
 particular and the universal in an identity : and the 
 predicate too is the very same unity (§ 170). — The 
 copula again, even while stating the identity of subject 
 and predicate, does so at first only by an abstract 'is.' 
 Conformably to such an identity the subject has to be 
 put also in the characteristic of the predicate. By this 
 means the latter also receives ihe characteristic of the 
 former : so that the copula receives its full complement 
 and full force. Such is the continuous specification by 
 which the judgment, through a copula charged with 
 content, comes to be a syllogism. As it is primarily 
 exhibited in the judgment, this gradual specification 
 consists in giving to an originally abstract, sensuous 
 universality the specific character of allness, of species, 
 of genus, and finally of the developed universality of 
 the notion. 
 
 After we are made aware of this continuous specifica- 
 
171.] JUDGMENT. 303 
 
 tion of the judgment, we can see a meaning and an 
 interconnexion in what are usually stated as the kinds 
 of judgment. Not only does the ordinary enumeration 
 seem purely casual, but it is also superficial, and even 
 bewildering in its statement of their distinctions. The 
 distinction between positive, categorical and assertory 
 judgments, is either a pure invention of fancy, or is left 
 undetermined. On the right theory, the different judg- 
 ments follow necessarily from one another, and present 
 the continuous specification of the notion ; for the judg- 
 ment itself is nothing but the notion specified. 
 
 When we look at the two preceding spheres of Being 
 and Essence, we see that the specified notions as judg- 
 ments are reproductions of these spheres, but put in the 
 simplicity of relation peculiar to the notion. 
 
 The various kinds of judgment are no empirical aggre- 
 gate. They are a systematic whole based on a principle ; 
 and it was one of Kant's great merits to have first empha- 
 sised the necessity of showing this. His proposed division, 
 according to the headings in his table of categories, into 
 judgments of quality, quantity, relation and modality, can 
 not be called satisfactory, partly from the merely formal 
 application of this categorical rubric, partly on account of 
 their content. Still it rests upon a true perception of the 
 fact that the different species of judgment derive their 
 features from the universal forms of the logical idea itself. 
 If we follow this clue, it will supply us with three chief 
 kinds of judgment parallel to the stages of Being, Essence, 
 and Notion. The second of these kinds, as required by the 
 character of Essence, which is the stage of differentiation, 
 must be doubled. We find the inner ground for this sys- 
 tematisation of judgments in the circumstance that when the . 
 Notion, which is the unity of Being and Essence in a com- 
 prehensive thought, unfolds, as it does in the judgment, it 
 must reproduce these two stages in a transformation proper 
 to the notion. The notion itself meanwhile is seen to mould 
 and form the genuine grade of judgment. 
 
304 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [171-172, 
 
 Far from occupying the same level, and being of equal 
 value, the different species of judgment form a series of 
 steps, the difference of which rests upon the logical signifi- 
 cance of the predicate. That judgments differ in value is 
 evident even in our ordinary ways of thinking. We should 
 not hesitate to ascribe a very slight faculty of judgment to a 
 person who habitually framed only such judgments as, ' This 
 wall is green,' 'This stove is hot.' On the other hand we 
 should credit with a genuine capacity of judgment the 
 person whose criticisms dealt with such questions as 
 whether a certain work of art was beautiful, whether a 
 certain action was good, and so on. In judgments of the 
 first-mentioned kind the content forms only an abstract 
 quality, the presence of which can be sufficiently detected 
 by immediate perception. To pronounce a work of art to be 
 beautiful, or an action to be good, requires on the contrary a 
 comparison of the objects with what they ought to be, i.e. 
 with their notion. 
 
 (a) Qualitative Judgment. 
 
 172.] The immediate judgment is the judgment of 
 definite Being. The subject is invested with a univer- 
 sality as its predicate, which is an immediate, and 
 therefore a sensible quality. It may be (i) a Positive 
 judgment : The individual is a particular. But the 
 individual is not a particular : or in more precise 
 language, such a single quality is not congruous with 
 the concrete nature of the subject. This is (2) a 
 Negative judgment. 
 
 It is one of the fundamental assumptions of dogmatic 
 Logic that Qualitative judgments such as, ' The rose is 
 red,* or 'is not red,' can contain truth. Correct they 
 may be, i.e. in the limited circle of perception, of finite 
 conception and thought : that depends on the content, 
 which likewise is finite, and, on its own merits, untrue. 
 Truth, however, as opposed to correctness, depends 
 solely on the form, viz. on the notion as it is put and 
 
172.] QUALITATIVE JUDGMENTS. 305 
 
 the reality corresponding to it. But truth of that stamp 
 is not found in the Qualitative judgment. 
 
 In common life the terms truth and correctness are often 
 treated as synonymous : we speak of the truth of a content, 
 when we are only thinking of its correctness. Correctness, 
 generally speaking, concerns only the formal coincidence 
 between our conception and its content, whatever the con- 
 stitution of this content may be. Truth, on the contrary, 
 lies in the coincidence of the object with itself, that is, with 
 its notion. That a person is sick, or that some one has com- 
 mitted a theft, may certainly be correct. But the content is 
 untrue. A sick body is not in harmony with the notion of 
 body, and there is a want of congruity between theft and the 
 notion of human conduct. These instances may show that 
 an immediate judgment, in which an abstract quality is pre- 
 dicated of an immediately individual thing, however correct 
 it may be, cannot contain truth. The subject and predicate 
 of it do not stand to each other in the relation of reality and 
 notion. 
 
 We may add that the untruth of the immediate judgment 
 lies in the incongruity between its form and content. To 
 say ' This rose is red,' involves (in virtue of the copula ' is ') 
 the coincidence of subject and predicate. The rose however 
 is a concrete thing, and so is not red only : it has also an 
 odour, a specific form, and many other features not implied 
 in the predicate red. The predicate on its part is an abstract 
 universal, and does not apply to the rose alone. There 
 are other flowers and other objects which are red too. The 
 subject and predicate in the immediate judgment touch, as it 
 were, only in a single point, but do not cover each other. The 
 case is different with the notional judgment. In pronouncing 
 an action to be good, we frame a notional judgment. Here, 
 as we at once perceive, there is a closer and a more intimate 
 relation than in the immediate judgment. The predicate in 
 the latter is some abstract quality which may or may not be 
 applied to the subject. In the judgment of the notion the 
 predicate is, as it were, the soul of the subject, by which the 
 subject, as the body of this soul, is characterised through 
 and through. 
 
 VOL. II. X 
 
306 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [173. 
 
 173.] This negation of a particular- quality, which is 
 the first negation, still leaves the connexion of the 
 subject with the predicate subsisting. The predicate is 
 in that manner a sort of relative universal, of which a 
 special phase only has been negatived. [To say, that 
 the rose is not red, implies that it is still coloured — in 
 the first place with another colour; which however 
 would be only one more positive judgment.] The in- 
 dividual however is not a universal. Hence (3) the 
 judgment suffers disruption into one of two forms. It 
 is either {a) the Identical judgment, an empty identical 
 relation stating that the individual is the individual ; or 
 it is [b) what is called the Infinite judgment, in which 
 we are presented with the total incompatibility of subject 
 and predicate. 
 
 Examples of the latter are : * The mind is no elephant : ' 
 * A lion is no table ; ' propositions which are correct but 
 absurd, exactly like the identical propositions: 'A lion 
 is a lion ; ' ' Mind is mind.' Propositions like these 
 are undoubtedly the truth of the immediate, or, as it is 
 called, Qualitative judgment. But they are not judg- 
 ments at all, and can only occur in a subjective thought 
 where even an untrue abstraction may hold its ground. 
 — In their objective aspect, these latter judgments ex- 
 press the nature of what is, or of sensible things, which, 
 as they declare, suffer disruption into an empty identity 
 on the one hand, and on the other a fully-charged rela- 
 tion — only that this relation is the qualitative antagonism 
 of the things related, their total incongruity. 
 
 The negatively-infinite judgment, in which the subject has 
 no relation whatever to the predicate, gets its place in the 
 Formal Logic solely as a nonsensical curiosity. But the 
 infinite judgment is not really a mere casual form adopted 
 by subjective thought. It exhibits the proximate result of 
 the dialectical process in the immediate judgments preceding 
 
173-174.] JUDGMENTS OF REFLECTION. 307 
 
 (the positive and simply -negative), and distinctly displays their 
 finitude and untruth. Crime may be quoted as an objective 
 instance of the negatively-infinite judgment. The person 
 committing a crime, such as a theft, does not, as in a suit 
 about civil rights, merely deny the particular right of another 
 person to some one definite thing. He denies the right of that 
 person in general, and therefore he is not merely forced to 
 restore what he has stolen, but is punished in addition, be- 
 cause he has violated law as law, i.e. law in general. The 
 civil-law suit on the contrary is an instance of the negative 
 judgment pure and simple where merely the particular law 
 is violated, whilst law in general is so far acknowledged. 
 Such a dispute is precisely paralleled by a negative judg- 
 ment, like, ' This flower is not red : ' by which we merely 
 deny the particular colour of the flower, but not its colour in 
 general, which may be blue, yellow, or any other. Similarly 
 death, as a negatively-infinite judgment, is distinguished 
 from disease as simply- negative. In disease, merely this or 
 that function of life is checked or negatived : in death, as we 
 ordinarily say, body and soul part, i.e. subject and predicate 
 utterly diverge. 
 
 (^) Judgment of Reflection. 
 174.] The individual put as individual (i. e. as re- 
 flected-into-self) into the judgment, has a predicate, in 
 comparison with which the subject, as self- relating, 
 continues to be still an other thing. — In existence the 
 subject ceases to be immediately qualitative, it is in 
 correlation, and inter-connexion with an other thing, — 
 with an external world. In this way the universality 
 of the predicate comes to signify this relativity — [e.g. 
 useful, or dangerous ; weight or acidity ; or again, in- 
 stinct ; are examples of such relative predicates). 
 
 The Judgment of Reflection is distinguished from the 
 Qualitative judgment by the circumstance that its predicate 
 is not an immediate or abstract quality, but of such a kind as 
 to exhibit the subject as in relation to something else. When 
 we say, e.g. ' This rose is red,' we regard the subject in its 
 X 2 
 
3o8 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. 
 
 '74-175- 
 
 immediate individuality, and without reference to anything 
 else. If, on the other hand, we frame the judgment, ' This 
 plant is medicinal,' we regard the subject, plant, as standing 
 in connexion with something else (the sickness which it 
 cures), by means of its predicate (its medicinality). The case 
 is the same with judgments like : This body is elastic : This 
 instrument is useful : This punishment has a deterrent 
 influence. In every one of these instances the predicate is 
 some category of reflection. They all exhibit an advance 
 beyond the immediate individuality of the subject, but none 
 of them goes so far as to indicate the adequate notion of it. 
 It is in this mode of judgment that ordinary raisonnement 
 luxuriates. The greater the concreteness of the object in 
 question, the more points of view does it offer to reflection ; 
 by which however its proper nature or notion is not ex- 
 hausted. 
 
 175.] (i) Firstly then the subject, the individual as 
 individual (in the Singular judgment), is a universal. 
 But (2) secondly, in this relation it is elevated above 
 its singularity. This enlargement is external, due to 
 subjective reflection, and at first is an indefinite number 
 of particulars, (This is seen in the Particular judg- 
 ment, which is obviously negative as well as positive : 
 the individual is divided in itself: partly it is self-related, 
 partly related to something else.) (3) Thirdly, Some 
 are the universal : particularity is thus enlarged to 
 universality : or universality is modified through the 
 individuality of the subject, and appears as allness 
 Community, the ordinary universality of reflection. 
 
 The subject, receiving, as in the Singular judgment, a uni- 
 versal predicate, is carried out beyond its mere individual 
 self. To say, 'This plant is wholesome,' implies not only 
 that this single plant is wholesome, but that some or several 
 are so. We have thus the particular judgment (some plants 
 are wholesome, some men are inventive, &c.). By means of 
 particularity the immediate individual comes to lose its inde- 
 pendence, and enters into an inter-connexion with something 
 
175-176.] JUDGMENTS OF REFLECTION. 309 
 
 else. Man, as this man, is not this single man alone : he 
 stands beside other men and becomes one in the crowd. 
 Just by this means however he belongs to his universal, and 
 is consequently raised. — The particular judgment is as much 
 negative as positive. If only some bodies are elastic, it is 
 evident that the rest are not elastic. 
 
 On this fact again depends the advance to the third form 
 of the Reflective judgment, viz. the judgment of allness (all 
 men are mortal, all metals conduct electricity). It is as ' all ' 
 that the universal is in the first instance generally en- 
 countered by reflection. The individuals form for reflection 
 the foundation, and it is orly our subjective action which 
 collects and describes them as 'all,' So far the universal 
 has the aspect of an external fastening, that holds together a 
 number of independent individuals, which have not the least 
 affinity towards it. This semblance of indifterence is how- 
 ever unreal : for the universal is the ground and foundation, 
 the root, and substance of the individual. If ^.^. we take 
 Caius, Titus, Sempronius, and the other inhabitants of a 
 town or country, the fact that all of them are men is not 
 merel}' something which they have in common, but their 
 universal or kind, without which these individuals would 
 not be at all. The case is very different with that superficial 
 generality falsely so called, which really means only what 
 attaches, or is common, to all the individuals. It has been 
 remarked, for example, that men, in contradistinction from 
 the lower animals, possess in common the appendage of 
 ear-lobes. It is evident, however, that the absence of these 
 ear-lobes in one man or another would not affect the rest of 
 his being, character, or capacities : whereas it would be 
 nonsense to suppose that Caius, without being a man, would 
 still be brave, learned, &c. The individual man is what he 
 is in particular, only in so far as he is before all things a 
 man as man and in general. And that generality is not 
 something external to, or something in addition to other 
 abstract qualities, or to mere features discovered by re- 
 flection. It is what permeates and includes in it everything 
 particular. 
 
 176.] The subject being thus likewise characterised 
 
3IO THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [176-177. 
 
 as a universal, there is an express identification of 
 subject and predicate, by which at the same time the 
 speciality of the judgment-form is deprived of all im- 
 portance. This unity of the content (the content being 
 the universality which is identical with the negative 
 reflection-in-self of the subject) makes the connexion in 
 judgment a necessary one. 
 
 The advance from the reflective judgment of allness to the 
 judgment of necessity is found in our usual modes of thought, 
 when we say that whatever appertains to all, appertains to 
 the species, and is therefore necessary. To say all plants, 
 or all men, is the same thing as to say the plant, or the man. 
 
 (y) Judgment of Necessity. 
 
 177.] The Judgment of Necessity, /'. e. of the identity 
 of the content in its diflference (i), contains, in the pre- 
 dicate, partly the substance or nature of the subject, the 
 concrete universal, the genus ; partly, seeing that this 
 universal also contains the specific character as negative, 
 the predicate represents the exclusive essential character, 
 the species. This is the Categorical judgment. 
 
 (2) Conformably to their substantiality, the two terms 
 receive the aspect of independent actuality. Their 
 identity is then inward only ; and thus the actuality of 
 the one is at the same time not its own, but the being of 
 the other. This is the Hypothetical judgment. 
 
 (3) If, in this self-surrender and self-alienation of the 
 notion, its inner identity is at the same time explicitly 
 put, the universal is the genus which is self-identical 
 in its mutually-exclusive individualities. This judgment, 
 which has this universal for both its terms, the one time 
 as a universal, the other time as the circle of its self- 
 excluding particularisation in which the 'either— or' as 
 much as the ' as well as ' stands for the genus, is the 
 
177.] JUDGMENTS OF NECESSITY. 3II 
 
 Disjunctive judgment. Universality, at first as a genus, 
 and now also as the circuit of its species, is thus described 
 and expressly put as a totality. 
 
 The Categorical judgment (such as ' Gold is a metal,' * The 
 rose is a plant') is the un-mediated judgment of necessity, 
 and finds within the sphere of Essence its parallel in the 
 relation of substance. All things are a Categorical judg- 
 ment. In other words, they have their substantial nature, 
 forming their fixed and unchangeable substratum. It is 
 only when things are studied from the point of view of their 
 kind, and as with necessity determined by the kind, that the 
 judgment first begins to be real. It betrays a defective 
 logical training to place upon the same level judgments like 
 'gold is dear,' and judgments like 'gold is a metal.' That 
 'gold is dear' is a matter of external connexion between it 
 and our wants or inclinations, the costs of obtaining it, and 
 other circumstances. Gold remains the same as it was, 
 though that external reference is altered or removed. Metal- 
 leity, on the contrary, constitutes the substantial nature of 
 gold, apart from which it, and all else that is in it, or can be 
 predicated of it, would be unable to subsist. The same is the 
 case if we say, 'Caius is a man.' We express by that, that 
 whatever else he maybe, has worth and meaning, only when 
 it corresponds to his substantial nature or manhood. 
 
 But even the Categorical judgment is to a certain extent 
 defective. It fails to give due place to the function or ele- 
 ment of particularity. Thus ' gold is a metal,' it is true ; but 
 so are silver, copper, iron : and metalleity as such has no 
 leanings to any of its particular species. In these circum- 
 stances we must advance from the Categorical to the Hypo- 
 thetical judgment, which may be expressed in the formula : 
 If A is, B is. The present case exhibits the same advance 
 as formerly took place from the relation of substance to the 
 relation of cause. In the Hypothetical judgment the specific 
 character of the content shows itself mediated and dependent 
 on something else : and this is exactly the relation of cause 
 and effect. And if we were to give a general interpretation 
 to the Hypothetical judgment, we should say that it expressly 
 
312 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [177-178. 
 
 realises the universal in its particularising. This brings us 
 to the third form of the Judgment of Necessity, the Dis- 
 junctive judgment. A is either B or C ot D. A work of 
 poetic art is either epic or lyric or dramatic. Colour is either 
 yellow or blue or red. The two terms in the Disjunctive 
 judgment are identical. The genus is the sum total of the 
 species, and the sum total of the species is the genus. This 
 unity of the universal and the particular is the notion : and 
 it is the notion which, as we now see, forms the content of 
 the judgment 
 
 (S) Judgment of the Notion. 
 
 178.] The Judgment of the Notion has for its content 
 the notion, the totality in simple form, the universal 
 with its complete speciality. The subject is, (i) in the 
 first place, an individual, which has for its predicate the 
 reflection of the particular existence on its universal ; 
 or the judgment states the agreement or disagreement 
 of these two aspects. That is, the predicate is such a 
 term as good, true, correct. This is the Assertory 
 judgment. 
 
 Judgments, such as whether an object, action, &c. is 
 good, bad, true, beautiful, &;c., are those to which even 
 ordinary language first applies the name of judgment. 
 We should never ascribe judgment to a person who 
 framed positive or negative judgments like, This rose is 
 red, This picture is red, green, dusty, &c. 
 
 The Assertory judgment, although rejected by society 
 as out of place when it claims authority on its own show- 
 ing, has however been made the single and all-essential 
 form of doctrine, even in philosophy, through the in- 
 fluence of the principle of immediate knowledge and 
 faith. In the so-called philosophic works which main- 
 tain this principle, we may read hundreds and hundreds 
 of assertions about reason, knowledge, thought, &c. 
 
178-180.] JUDGMENTS OF THE NOTION. 313 
 
 which, now that external authority counts for Httle, seek 
 to accredit themselves by an endless restatement of the 
 same thesis. 
 
 179.] On the part of its at first un-mediated subject, 
 the Assertory judgment does not contain the relation of 
 particular with universal which is expressed in the 
 predicate. This judgment is consequently a mere sub- 
 jective particularity, and is confronted by a contrary 
 assertion with equal right, or rather want of right. It 
 is therefore at once turned into (2) a Problematical 
 judgment. But when we explicitly attach the objective 
 particularity to the subject and make its speciality the con- 
 stitutive feature of its existence, the subject (3) then ex- 
 presses the connexion of that objective particularity with 
 its constitution, i.e. with its genus; and thus expresses 
 what forms the content of the predicate (see § 178). 
 [This {the immediate individuality) house {the gemts), 
 being so and so constituted {particularity), is good or 
 bad.] This is the Apodictic judgment. All things 
 are a genus {i.e. have a meaning and purpose) in an 
 individual actuality of a particular constitution. And 
 they are finite, because the particular in them may and 
 also may not conform to the universal. 
 
 180.] In this manner subject and predicate are each 
 the whole judgment. The immediate constitution of the 
 subject is at first exhibited as the intermediating ground, 
 where the individuality of the actual thing meets with 
 its universality, and in this way as the ground of the 
 judgment. What has been really made explicit is the 
 oneness of subject and predicate, as the notion itself, 
 filling up the empty 'is' of the copula. While its con- 
 stituent elements are at the same time distinguished as 
 subject and predicate, the notion is put as their unity, as 
 the connexion which serves to intermediate them : in 
 short, as the Syllogism. 
 
314 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [181. 
 
 [c] The Syllogism. 
 
 181.] The Syllogism brings the notion and the judg- 
 ment into one. It is notion, — being the simple identity 
 into which the distinctions of form in the judgment have 
 retired. It is judgment, — because it is at the same time 
 set in reality, that is, put in the distinction of its terms. 
 The Syllogism is the reasonable, and everything 
 reasonable. 
 
 Even the ordinary theories represent the Syllogism 
 to be the form of reasonableness, but only a subjective 
 form ; and no inter-connexion whatever is shown to 
 exist between it and any other reasonable content, such 
 as a reasonable principle, a reasonable action, idea, &c. 
 The name of reason is much and often heard, and 
 appealed to : but no one thinks of explaining its specific 
 character, or saying what it is, — least of all that it has 
 any connexion with Syllogism. But formal Syllogism 
 really presents what is reasonable in such a reasonless 
 way that it has nothing to do with any reasonable 
 matter. But as the matter in question can only be 
 rational in virtue of the same quality by which thought 
 is reason, it can be made so by the form only : and that 
 form is Syllogism. And what is a Syllogism but an 
 explicit putting, i.e. realising of the notion, at first in 
 form only, as stated above ? Accordingly the Syllogism 
 is the essential ground of whatever is true : and at the 
 present stage the definition of the Absolute is that it is 
 the Syllogism, or stating the principle in a proposition : 
 Everything is a Syllogism. Everything is a notion, the 
 existence of which is the differentiation of its members 
 or functions, so that the universal nature of the Notion 
 gives itself external reality by means of particularity, 
 and thereby, and as a negative reflection-into-self, makes 
 itself an individual. Or, conversely: the actual thing is 
 
i8i-i82.j SYLLOGISM. 315 
 
 an individual, which by means of particularity rises to 
 universality and makes itself identical with itself — The 
 actual is one : but it is also the divergence from each 
 other of the constituent elements of the notion ; and the 
 Syllogism represents the orbit of intermediation of its 
 elements, by which it realises its unity. 
 
 The Syllogism, like the notion and the judgment, is usually 
 described as a form merely of our subjective thinking. The 
 Syllogism, it is said, is the process of proving the judgment. 
 And certainly the judgment does in every case refer us to 
 the Syllogism. The step from the one to the other however 
 is not brought about by our subjective action, but by the 
 judgment itself which puts itself as Syllogism, and in the 
 conclusion returns to the unity of the notion. The precise 
 point by which we pass to the Syllogism is found in the 
 Apodictic judgment. In it we have an individual which by 
 means of its qualities connects itself vVith its universal or 
 notion. Here we see the particular becoming the mediating 
 mean between the individual and the universal. This gives 
 the fundamental form of the Syllogism, the gradual specifica- 
 tion of which, formally considered, consists in the fact that 
 universal and individual also occupy this place of mean. 
 This again paves the way for the passage from subjectivity 
 to objectivity. 
 
 182.] In the 'immediate' Syllogism the several as- 
 pects of the notion confront one another abstractly, and 
 stand in an external relation only. We have first the 
 two extremes, which are Individuality and Universality; 
 and then the notion, as the mean for locking the two 
 together, is in like manner only abstract Particularity. 
 In this way the extremes are put as independent and 
 without affinity either towards one another or towards 
 their mean. Such a Syllogism contains reason, but in 
 utter notionlessness,— the formal Syllogism of Under- 
 standing. In it the subject is coupled with an other 
 character; or the universal by this mediation subsumes 
 
3l6 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [182. 
 
 a subject external to it. In the rational Syllogism, on 
 the contrary, the subject is by means of the mediation 
 coupled, with itself. In this manner it first comes to be 
 a subject : or, in the subject we have the first germ of 
 the rational Syllogism. 
 
 In the following examination, the Syllogism of Under- 
 standing, according to the interpretation usually put 
 upon it, is expressed in its subjective shape ; the shape 
 which it has when we are said to make such Syllogisms. 
 And it really is only a subjective syllogising. Such 
 Syllogism however has also an objective meaning; it 
 expresses only the finitude of things, but does so in the 
 specific mode which the form has here reached. In 
 the case of finite things their subjectivity, being only 
 thinghood, is separable from their properties or their 
 particularity, but also separable from their universality : 
 not only when the universality is the bare quality of the 
 thing and its external inter-connexion with other things, 
 but also when it is its genus and notion. 
 
 On the above-mentioned theory of syllogism, as the ra- 
 tional form par excellence, reason has been defined as the 
 faculty of syllogising, whilst understanding is defined as the 
 faculty of forming notions. We might object to the con- 
 ception on which this depends, and according to which the 
 mind is merely a sum of forces or faculties existing side by 
 side. But apart from that objection, we may observe in 
 regard to the parallelism of understanding with the notion, 
 as well as of reason with syllogism, that the notion is as 
 little a mere category of the understanding as the syllogism 
 is without qualification definable as rational. For, in the 
 first place, what the Formal Logic usually examines in its 
 theory of syllogism, is really nothing but the mere syllogism 
 of understanding, which has no claim to the honour of being 
 made a form of rationality, still less to be held as the em- 
 bodiment of all reason. The notion, in the second place, so 
 far from being a form of understanding, owes its degradation 
 
i8a-i83.] QUALITATIVE SYLLOGISMS. 317 
 
 to such a place entirely to the influence of that abstract mode 
 of thought. And it is not unusual to draw such a distinction 
 between a notion of understanding and a notion of reason. 
 The distinction however does not mean that notions are of 
 two kinds. It means that our own action often stops short 
 at the mere negative and abstract form of the notion, when 
 we might also have proceeded to apprehend the notion in its 
 true nature, as at once positive and concrete. It is e.g. the 
 mere understanding, which thinks liberty to be the abstract 
 contrary of necessity, whereas the adequate rational notion 
 of liberty requires the element of necessity to be merged 
 in it. Similarly the definition of God, given by what is called 
 Deism, is merely the mode in which the understanding 
 thinks God : whereas Christianity, to which He is known as 
 the Trinity, contains the rational notion of God. 
 
 (a) Qualitative Syllogism. 
 
 183.] The first syllogism is a syllogism of definite 
 being, — a Qualitative Syllogism, as stated in the last 
 paragraph. Its form (i) is I — P— U : i.e. a subject 
 as Individual is coupled (concluded) with a Universal 
 character by means of a (Particular) quality. 
 
 Of course the subject [terminus minor) has other 
 characteristics besides individuality, just as the other 
 extreme (the predicate of the conclusion, or terminus 
 major) has other characteristics than mere universality. 
 But here the interest turns only on the characteristics 
 through which these terms make a syllogism. 
 
 The syllogism of existence is a syllogism of understanding 
 merely, at least in so far as it leaves the individual, the 
 particular, and the universal to confront each other quite 
 abstractly. In this syllogism the notion is at the very 
 height of self-estrangement. We have in it an immediately 
 individual thing as subject : next some one particular aspect 
 or property attaching to this subject is selected, and by 
 means of this property the individual turns out to be a 
 universal. Thus we may say, This rose is red : Red is a 
 
3l8 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [183-184. 
 
 colour : Therefore, this rose is a coloured object. It is this 
 aspect of the syllogism which the common logics mainly 
 treat of. There was a time when the syllogism was regarded 
 as an absolute rule for all cognition, and when a scientific 
 statement was not held to be valid until it had been shown 
 to follow from a process of syllogism. At present, on the 
 contrary, the different forms of the syllogism are met no- 
 where save in the manuals of Logic ; and an acquaintance 
 with them is considered a piece of mere pedantry, of no 
 further use either in practical life or in science. It would 
 indeed be both useless and pedantic to parade the whole 
 machinery of the formal syllogism on every occasion. And 
 yet the several forms of syllogism make themselves con- 
 stantly felt in our cognition. If any one, when awaking on 
 a winter morning, hears the creaking of the carriages on the 
 street, and is thus led to conclude that it has frozen hard in 
 the night, he has gone through a syllogistic operation : — an 
 operation which is every day repeated under the greatest 
 variety of conditions. The interest, therefore, ought at least 
 not to be less in becoming expressly conscious of this daily 
 action of our thinking selves, than confessedly belongs to 
 the study of the functions of organic life, such as the pro- 
 cesses of digestion, assimilation, respiration, or even the 
 processes and structures of the nature around us. We do 
 not, however, for a moment deny that a study of Logic is no 
 more necessary to teach us how to draw correct conclusions, 
 than a previous study of anatomy and physiology is required 
 in order to digest or breathe. 
 
 Aristotle was the first to observe and describe the dif- 
 ferent forms, or, as they are called, figures of syllogism, in 
 their subjective meaning : and he performed his work so 
 exactly and surely, that no essential £(ddition has ever been 
 required. But while sensible of the value of what he has 
 thus done, we must not forget that the forms of the syllogism 
 of understanding, and of finite thought altogether, are not 
 what Aristotle has made use of in his properly philosophical 
 investigations. (See § 189.) 
 
 184.] This syllogism is completely contingent («) in the 
 matter of its terms. The Middle Term, being an abstract 
 
184.] QUALITATIVE SYLLOGISMS. 319 
 
 particularity, is nothing but any quality whatever of 
 the subject : but the subject, being immediate and thus 
 empirically concrete, has several others, and could there- 
 fore be coupled with exactly as many other universalities 
 as it possesses single qualities. Similarly a single par- 
 ticularity may have various characters in itself, so that 
 the same medius terminus would serve to connect the 
 subject with several different universals. 
 
 It is more a caprice of fashion, than a sense of its in- 
 correctness, which has led to the disuse of ceremonious 
 syllogising. This and the following section indicate 
 the uselessness of such syllogising for the ends of truth. 
 
 The point of view indicated in the paragraph shows 
 how this style of syllogisrn can ' demonstrate ' (as the 
 phrase goes) the most diverse conclusions. All that is 
 requisite is to find a medius terminus from which the 
 transition can be made to the proposition sought. An- 
 other medius terminus would enable us to demonstrate 
 something else, and even the contrary of the last. And 
 the more concrete an object is, the more aspects it has, 
 which may become such middle terms. To determine 
 which of these aspects is more essential than another, 
 again, requires a further syllogism of this kind, which 
 fixing on the single quality can with equal ease discover 
 in it some aspect or- consideration by which it can make 
 good its claims to be considered necessary and im- 
 portant. 
 
 Little as we usually think on. the Syllogism of Under- 
 standing in the daily business of life, it never ceases to play 
 its part there. In a civil suit, for instance, it is the duty of 
 the advocate to give due force to the legal titles which make 
 in favour of his client. In logical language, such a legal title 
 is nothing but a middle term. Diplomatic transactions afford 
 another illustration of the same, when, for instance, different 
 powers lay claim to one and the same territory. In such a 
 case the laws of inheritance, the geographical position of the 
 
320 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [184-186. 
 
 country, the descent and the language of its inhabitants, or 
 any other ground, may be emphasised as a mediiis terminus- 
 
 185.] (/3) This syllogism, if it is contingent in point 
 of its terms, is no less contingent in virtue of the form 
 of relation which is found in it. In the syllogism, 
 according to its notion, truth lies in connecting two 
 distinct things by a Middle Term in which they are 
 one. But connexions of the extremes with the Middle 
 Term (the so-called premisses, the major and the minor 
 premiss) are in the case of this syllogism much 
 more decidedly immediate connexions. In other words, 
 they have not a proper Middle Term. 
 
 This contradiction in the syllogism exhibits a new 
 case of the infinite progression. Each of the premisses 
 evidently calls for a fresh syllogism to demonstrate it : 
 and as the new syllogism has two immediate premisses, 
 like its predecessor, the demand for proof is doubled at 
 every step, and repeated without end. 
 
 186.] On account of its importance for experience, 
 there has been here noted a defect in the syllogism, 
 to which in this form absolute correctness had been 
 ascribed. This defect however must lose itself in the 
 further specification of the syllogism. For we are now 
 within the sphere of the notion ; and here therefore, gs 
 well as in the judgment, the opposite character is not 
 merely present potentially, but is explicit. To work 
 out the gradual specification of the syllogism, therefore, 
 there need only be admitted and accepted what is at 
 each step realised by the syllogism itself. 
 
 Through the immediate syllogism I — P— U, the In- 
 dividual is mediated (through a Particular) with the 
 Universal, and in this conclusion put as a universal. It 
 follows that the individual subject, becoming itself a 
 universal, serves to unite the two extremes, and to form 
 their ground of intermediation. This gives the second 
 
186-187.] SYLLOGISTIC FIGURES. 321 
 
 figure of the syllogism, (2) U — I — P. It expresses the 
 truth of the first ; it shows in other words that the inter- 
 mediation has taken place in the individual, and is thus 
 something contingent. 
 
 187.] The universal, which in the first conclusion 
 was specified through individuality, passes over into the 
 second figure and there now occupies the place that 
 belonged to the immediate subject. In the second 
 figure it is concluded with the particular. By this con- 
 clusion therefore the universal is explicitly put as 
 particular — and is now made to mediate between the 
 two extremes, the places of which are occupied by the 
 two others (the particular and the individual). This is 
 the third figure of the syllogism : (3) P — U — I. 
 
 What are called the Figures of the syllogism (b^ing 
 three in number, for the fourth is a superfluous and even 
 absurd addition of the Moderns to the three known to 
 Aristotle) are in the usual mode of treatment put side 
 by side, without the slightest thought of showing their 
 necessity, and still less of pointing out their import and 
 value. No wonder then that the figures have been in 
 later times treated as an empty piece of formalism. 
 They have however a very real significance, derived 
 from the necessity for every function or characteristic 
 element of the notion to become the whole itself, and 
 to stand as mediating ground. — But to find out what 
 * moods ' of the propositions (such as whether they may 
 be universals, or negatives) are needed to enable us to 
 draw a correct conclusion in the different figures, is 
 a mechanical inquiry, which its purely mechanical nature 
 and its intrinsic meaninglessness have very properly 
 consigned to oblivion. And Aristotle would have been 
 the last person to give any countenance to those who 
 wish to attach importance to such inquiries or to the 
 syllogism of understanding in general. It is true that 
 
322 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [187-188. 
 
 he described these, as well as numerous other forms of 
 mind and nature, and that he examined and expounded 
 their specialities. But in his metaphysical theories, as 
 well as his theories of nature and mind, he was very far 
 from taking as basis, or criterion, the syllogistic forms 
 of the 'understanding.' Indeed it might be maintained 
 that not one of these theories would ever have come into 
 existence, or been allowed to exist, if it had been com- 
 pelled to submit to the laws of understanding. With 
 all the descriptiveness and analytic faculty which Aris- 
 totle after his fashion is substantially strong in, his 
 ruling principle is always the speculative notion ; and 
 that syllogistic of 'understanding' to which he first gave 
 such a definite expression is never allowed to intrude in 
 the higher domain of philosophy. 
 
 In their objective sense, the three figures of the syllogism 
 declare that everything rational is manifested as a triple 
 syllogism ; that is to say, each one of the members takes in 
 turn the place of the extremes, as well as of the mean which 
 reconciles them. Such, for example, is the case with the 
 three branches of philosophy; the Logical Idea, Nature, 
 and Mind. As we first see them, Nature is the middle term 
 which links the others together. Nature, the totality im- 
 mediately before us, unfolds itself into the two extremes of 
 the Logical Idea and Mind. But Mind is Mind only when 
 it is mediated through nature. Then, in the second place, 
 Mind, which we know as the principle of individuality, or as 
 the actualising principle, is the mean ; and Nature and the 
 Logical Idea are the extremes. It is Mind which cognises 
 the Logical Idea in Nature and which thus raises Nature to 
 its essence. In the third place again the Logical Idea itself 
 becomes the mean : it is the absolute substance both of mind 
 and of nature, the universal and all-pervading principle. 
 These are the members of the Absolute Syllogism. 
 
 188.] In the round by which each constituent function 
 assumes successively the place of mean and of the two 
 
188-189.] MATHEMATICAL SYLLOGISMS. 323 
 
 extremes, their specific difference from each other has 
 been superseded. In this form, where there is no dis- 
 tinction between its constituent elements, the syllogism 
 at first has for its connective link equality, or the external 
 identity of understanding. This is the Quantitative or 
 Mathematical Syllogism: if two things are equal to 
 a third, they are equal to one another. 
 
 Everybody knows that this Quantitative syllogism appears 
 as a mathematical axiom, which like other axioms is said to 
 be a principle that does not admit of proof, and which in- 
 deed being self-evident does not require such proof. These 
 mathematical axioms however are really nothing but logical 
 propositions, which, so far as they enunciate definite and 
 particular thoughts, are deducible from the universal and 
 self-characterising thought. To deduce them, is to give their 
 proof That is true of the Quantitative syllogism, to which 
 mathematics gives the rank of an axiom. It is really the 
 proximate result of the qualitative or immediate syllogism. 
 Finally, the Quantitative syllogism is the syllogism in utter 
 formlessness. The difference between the terms which is 
 required by the notion is suspended. Extraneous circum- 
 stances alone can decide what propositions are to be pre- 
 misses here : and therefore in applying this syllogism we 
 make a pre-supposition of what has been elsewhere proved 
 and established. 
 
 189.] Two results follow as to the form. In the first 
 place, each constituent element has taken the place and 
 performed the function of the mean and therefore of the 
 whole, thus implicitly losing its partial and abstract 
 character (§ 182 and § 184); secondly, the mediation 
 has been completed (§ 185), though the completion too 
 is only implicit, that is, only as a circle of mediations 
 which in turn pre-suppose each other. In the first 
 figure I — P — U the two premisses I is P and P is U are 
 yet without a mediation. The former premiss is mediated 
 in the third, the latter in the second figure. But each 
 
 Y 2 
 
324 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [189-190. 
 
 of these two figures, again, for the mediation of its pre- 
 misses pre-supposes the two others. 
 
 In consequence of this, the mediating unity of the 
 notion must be put no longer as an abstract particularity, 
 but as a developed unity of the individual and universal 
 — and in the first place a reflected unity of these 
 elements. That is to say, the individuality gets at the 
 same time the character of universality. A mean of 
 this kind gives the Syllogism of Reflection. 
 
 (3) Syllogism of Reflection. 
 190.] If the mean, in the first place, be not only an 
 abstract particular character of the subject, but at the 
 same time all the individual concrete subjects which 
 possess that character, but possess it only along with 
 others, (i) we have the Syllogism of Allness. The 
 major premiss, however, which has for its subject the 
 particular character, the terminus medtus, as allness, 
 pre-supposes the very conclusion which ought rather to 
 have pre-supposed it. It rests therefore (2) on an 
 Induction, in which the mean is given by the complete 
 list of individuals as such,- -a, b, c, d, Sic. On account 
 of the disparity, however, between universality and an 
 immediate and empirical individuality, the list can never 
 be complete. Induction therefore rests upon (3) Analogy. 
 The middle term of Analogy is an individual, which 
 however is understood as equivalent to its essential 
 universality, its genus, or essential character. — The 
 first syllogism for its intermediation turns us over to the 
 oecond, and the second turns us over to the third. But 
 the third no less demands an intrinsically determinate 
 Universality, or an individuality as type of the genus, 
 after the round of the forms of external connexion 
 between individuality and universality has been run 
 through in the figures of the Reflective Syllogism. 
 
igo.] SYLLOGISMS OF REFLECTION. 325 
 
 By the Syllogism of Allness the defect in the first 
 form of the Syllogism of Understanding, noted in § 184, 
 is remedied, but only to give rise to a new defect. This 
 defect is that the major premiss itself pre-supposes what 
 really ought to be the conclusion, and pre-supposes it as 
 what is thus an 'immediate' proposition. All men are 
 mortal, therefore Caius is mortal : All metals conduct 
 electricity, therefore e.g. copper does so. In order to 
 enunciate these major premisses, which when they say 
 ' all ' mean the ' immediate ' individuals and are properly 
 intended to be empirical propositions, it is requisite that 
 the propositions about the individual man Caius, or the 
 individual metal copper, should previously have been 
 ascertained to be correct. Everybody feels not merely 
 the pedantry, but the unmeaning formalism of such 
 syllogisms as : All men are mortal, Caius is a man, 
 therefore Caius is mortal. 
 
 1 he syllogism of Allness hands us over to the syllogism 
 of Induction, in which the individuals form the coupling 
 mean, ' All metals conduct electricity,' is an empirical pro- 
 position derived from experiments made with each of the 
 individual metals. We thus get the syllogism of Induction 
 
 I 
 in the following shape P— I— U. 
 
 I 
 
 Gold is a metal : silver is a metal : so is copper, lead, &c. 
 This is the major premiss. Then comes the minor premiss : 
 All these bodies conduct electricity ; and hence results the 
 conclusion, that all metals conduct electricity. The point 
 which brings about a combination here is individuality in the 
 shape of allness. But this syllogism once more hands us 
 over to another syllogism. Its mean is constituted by the 
 complete list of the individuals. That pre-supposes that 
 over a certain region observation and experience are com- 
 pleted. But the things in question here are individuals ; and 
 
326 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [190, 
 
 so again we are landed in the progression ad infinitum 
 (i, i, i, &c.). In other words, in no Induction can we ever 
 exhaust the individuals. The 'all metals,' 'all plants,' of our 
 statements, mean only all the metals, all the plants, which 
 we have hitherto become acquainted with. Every Induction 
 is consequently imperfect. One and the other observation, 
 many it may be, have been made : but all the cases, all the 
 individuals, have not been observed. By this defect of In- 
 duction we are led on to Analogy. In the syllogism of 
 Analogy we conclude from the fact that some things of a 
 certain kind possess a certain quality, that the same quality 
 is possessed by other things of the same kind. It would be 
 a syllogism of Analogy, for example, if we said : In all 
 planets hitherto discovered this has been found to be the 
 law of motion, consequently a newly discovered planet will 
 probably move according to the same law. In the experiential 
 sciences Analog^' deservedly occupies a high place, and has 
 led to results of the highest importance. Analogy is the in- 
 stinct of reason, creating an anticipation that this or that 
 characteristic, which experience has discovered, has its root 
 in the inner nature or kind of an object, and arguing on the 
 faith of that anticipation. Analogy it should be added may 
 be superficial or it may be thorough. It would certainly be 
 a very bad analogy to argue that since the man Caius is 
 a scholar, and Titus also is a man, Titus will probably be a 
 scholar too: and it would be bad because a man's learning 
 is not an unconditional consequence of his manhood. Super- 
 ficial analogies of this kind however are very frequently met 
 with. It is often argued, for example : The earth is a celestial 
 body, so is the moon, and it is therefore in all probability 
 inhabited as well as the earth. The analogy is not one whit 
 better than that previously mentioned. That the earth is 
 inhabited does not depend on its being a celestial body, but 
 on other conditions, such as the presence of an atmosphere, 
 and of water in connexion with the atmosphere, &c. : and 
 these are precisely the conditions which the moon, so far as 
 we know, does not possess. What has in modern times been 
 called the Philosophy of Nature consists principally in a 
 frivolous play with empty and external analogies, which, 
 
igo-iga.] SYLLOGISMS OF NECESSITY. 327 
 
 however, claim to be considered profound results. The 
 natural consequence has been to discredit the philosophical 
 study of nature. 
 
 (y) Syllogism of Necessity. 
 
 191.] The Syllogism of Necessity, if we look to its 
 purely abstract characteristics or terms, has for its mean 
 the Universal in the same way as the Syllogism of 
 Reflection has the Individual, the latter being in the 
 second, and the former in the third figure (§ 187). The 
 Universal is expressly put as in its very nature intrinsic- 
 ally determinate. In the first place (i) the Particular, 
 meaning by the particular the specific genus or species, 
 is the term for mediating the extremes — as is done in 
 the Categorical syllogism. (2) The same office is per- 
 formed by the Individual, taking the individual as 
 immediate being, so that it is as much mediating as 
 mediated :— as happens in the Hypothetical syllogism, 
 (3) We have also the mediating Universal explicitly put 
 as a totality of its particular members, and as a single 
 particular, or exclusive individuality :— which happens 
 in the Disjunctive syllogism. It is one and the same 
 universal which is in these terms of the Disjunctive 
 syllogism ; they are only different forms for express- 
 ing it. 
 
 192.] The syllogism has been taken conformably to 
 the distinctions which it contains ; and the general 
 result of the course of their evolution has been to show 
 that these differences work out their own abolition and 
 destroy the notion's outwardness to its own self. And, 
 as we see, in the first place, (i) each of the dynamic 
 elements has proved itself the systematic whole of these 
 elements, in short a whole syllogism, — they are conse- 
 quently implicitly identical. In the second place, (2) the 
 negation of their distinctions and of the mediation of 
 
328 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [192. 
 
 one through another constitutes independency ; so that 
 it is one and the same universal which is in these forms, 
 and which is in this way also explicitly put as their 
 identity. In this ideality of its dynamic elements, the 
 syllogistic process may be described as essentially in- 
 volving the negation of the characters through which its 
 course runs, as being a mediative process through the 
 suspension of mediation, — as coupling the subject not 
 with another, but with a suspended other, in one word, 
 with itself 
 
 In the common logic, the doctrine of syllogism is supposed 
 to conclude the first part, or what is called the ' elementary ' 
 theory. It is followed by the second part, the doctrine of 
 Method, which proposes to show how a body of scientific 
 knowledge is created by applying to existing objects the 
 forms of thought discussed in the elementary part. Whence 
 these objects originate, and what the thought of objectivity 
 generally speaking implies, are questions to which the Logic 
 of Understanding vouchsafes no further answer. It believes 
 thought to be a mere subjective and formal activity, and the 
 objective fact, which confronts thought, to have a separate 
 and permanent being. But this dualism is a half-truth : and 
 there is a want of intelligence in the procedure which at once 
 accepts, without inquiring into their origin, the categories of 
 subjectivity and objectivity. Both of them, subjectivity as 
 well as objectivity, are certainly thoughts — even specific 
 thoughts : which must show themselves founded on the 
 universal and self-determining thought. This has here been 
 done — at least for subjectivity. We have recognised it, or 
 the notion subjective (vvhich includes the notion proper, the 
 judgment, and the syllogism) as the dialectical result of the 
 first two main stages of the Logical Idea, Being and Essence. 
 To say that the notion is subjective and subjective only, is so 
 far quite correct : for the notion certainly is subjectivity itself 
 Not less subjective than the notion are also the judgment 
 and syllogism : and these forms, together with the so-called 
 Laws of Thought (the Laws of Identity, Difference, and 
 
I92-I93-] NOTION AND OBJECT. 329 
 
 Sufficient Ground), make up the contents of what is called 
 the ' Elements ' in the common logic. But we may go a 
 step further. This subjectivity, with its functions of notion, 
 judgment, and syllogism, is not like a set of empty compart- 
 ments which has to get filled from without by separately- 
 existing objects. It would be truer to say that it is sub- 
 jectivity itself which, as dialectical, breaks through its own 
 barriers and opens out into objectivity by means of the 
 syllogism. 
 
 193.] This ' realisation ' of the notion,— a realisation 
 in which the universal is this one totality withdrawn 
 back into itself (of which the different members are no 
 less the whole, and) which has given itself a character 
 of 'immediate ' unity by merging the mediation: — this 
 realisation of the notion is the Object. 
 
 This transition from the Subject, the notion in general, 
 and especially the syllogism, to the Object, may, at the 
 first glance, appear strange, particularly if we look only 
 at the Syllogism of Understanding, and suppose syllo- 
 gising to be only an act of consciousness. But that 
 strangeness imposes on us no obligation to seek to 
 make the transition plausible to the image-loving con- 
 ception. The only question which can be considered 
 is, whether our usual conception of what is called an 
 'object' approximately corresponds to the object as 
 here described. By ' object ' is commonly understood 
 not an abstract being, or an existing thing merely, or 
 any sort of actuality, but something independent, con- 
 crete, and self-complete, this completeness being the 
 totality of the notion. That the object {Objekt) is also 
 an object to us {Gegenstand) and is external to some- 
 thing else, will be more precisely seen, when it puts 
 itself in contrast with the subjective. At present, as that 
 into which the notion has passed from its mediation, it 
 is only immediate object and nothing more, just as the 
 
330 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [193. 
 
 notion is not describable as subjective, previous to the 
 subsequent contrast with objectivity. 
 
 Further, the Object in general is the one total, in 
 itself still unspecified, the Objective World as a whole, 
 God, the Absolute Object. The object, however, has 
 also difference attaching to it : it falls into pieces, in- 
 definite in their multiplicity (making an objective world); 
 and each of these individualised parts is also an object, 
 an intrinsically concrete, complete, and independent 
 existence. 
 
 Objectivity has been compared with being, existence, 
 and actuality ; and so too the transition to existence and 
 actuality (not to being, for it is the primary and quite 
 abstract immediate) maybe compared with the transition 
 to objectivity. The ground from which existence pro- 
 ceeds, and the reflective correlation which is merged in 
 actuality, are nothing but the as yet imperfectly realised 
 notion. They are only abstract aspects of it, — the 
 ground being its merely essence-bred unity, and the 
 correlation only the connexion of real sides which are 
 supposed to have only self-reflected being. The notion 
 is the unity of the two ; and the object is not a merely 
 essence-like, but inherently universal unity, not only 
 containing real distinctions, but containing them as 
 totalities in itself. 
 
 It is evident that in all these transitions there is a 
 further purpose than merely to show the indissoluble 
 connexion between the notion or thought and being. 
 It has been more than once remarked that being is 
 nothing more than simple self-relation, and this meagre 
 category is certainly implied in the notion, or even in 
 thought. But the meaning of these transitions is not to 
 accept characteristics or categories, as only implied ; — 
 a fault which mars even the Ontological argument for 
 God's existence, when it is stated that being is one 
 
193.] NOTION AND OBJECT. 331 
 
 among realities. What such a transition does, is to take 
 the notion, as it ought to be primarily characterised per 
 se as a notion, with which this remote abstraction of 
 being, or eve of objectivity, has as yet nothing to do, 
 and looking at its specific character as a notional 
 character alone, to see when and whether it passes over 
 into a form which is different from the character as it 
 belongs to the notion and appears in it. 
 
 If the Object, the product of this transition, be brought 
 into relation with the notion, which, so far as its special 
 form is concerned, has vanished in it, we may give a 
 correct expression to the result, by saying that notion 
 (or, if it be preferred, subjectivity) and object are im- 
 plicitly the same. But it is equally correct to say that 
 they are different. In short, the two modes of expres- 
 sion are equally correct and incorrect. The true state 
 of the case can be presented in no expressions of this 
 kind. The 'implicit' is an abstraction, still more 
 partial and inadequate than the notion itself, of which 
 the inadequacy is upon the whole suspended, by suspend- 
 ing itself to the object with its opposite inadequacy. 
 Hence that implicitness also must, by its negation, give 
 itself the character of explicitness. As in every case, 
 speculative identity is not the above-mentioned triviality 
 of an implicit identity of subject and object. This has 
 been said often enough. Yet it could not be too 
 often repeated, if the intention were really to put an 
 end to the stale and purely malicious misconception in 
 regard to this identity: — of which however there can be 
 no reasonable expectation. 
 
 Looking at that unity in a quite general way, and 
 raising no objection to the one-sided form of its implicit- 
 ness, we find it as the well-known pre-supposition of 
 the ontological proof for the existence of God. There, 
 it appears as supreme^perfection. Anselm, in whom the 
 
332 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [193. 
 
 notable suggestion of this proof first occurs, no doubt 
 originally restricted himself to the question whether 
 a certain content was in our thinking only. His 
 words are briefly these : ' Certe id quo majus cogitari 
 nequtt, non potest esse in intellectu solo. Si enint vel in 
 solo intellectu est, potest cogitari esse et in re : quod majus 
 est. Si ergo id quo majus cogitari non- potest, est in solo 
 intellectu ; id ipsum quo majus cogitari non potest, est quo 
 majus cogitari potest. Sed certe hoc esse non potest.' 
 (Certainly that, than which nothing greater can be 
 thought, cannot be in the intellect alone. For even if it 
 is in the intellect alone, it can also be thought to exist 
 in fact : and that is greater. If then that, than which 
 nothing greater can be thought, is in the intellect alone; 
 then the very thing, which is greater than anything 
 which can be thought, can be exceeded in thought. 
 But certainly this is impossible.) The same unity 
 received a more objective expression in Descartes, 
 Spinoza and others : while the theory of immediate cer- 
 titude or faith presents it, on the contrary, in somewhat 
 the same subjective aspect as Anselm. These Intui- 
 tionalists hold that in our consciousness the attribute of 
 being is indissolubly associated with the conception of 
 God. The theory of faith brings even the conception of 
 external finite things under the same inseparable nexus 
 between the consciousness and the being of them, on 
 the ground that perception presents them conjoined with 
 the attribute of existence : and in so saying, it is no 
 doubt correct. It would be utterly absurd, however, to 
 suppose that the association in consciousness between 
 existence and our conception of finite things is of the 
 same description as the association between existence 
 and the conception of God. To do so would be to 
 forget that finite things are changeable and transient, 
 i. e. that existence is associated with them for a season, 
 
193] NOTION AND OBJECT. 333 
 
 but that the association is neither eternal nor insepar- 
 able. Speaking in the phraseology of the categories 
 before us, we may say that, to call a thing finite, means 
 that its objective existence is not in harmony with the 
 thought of it, with its universal calling, its kind and its 
 end. Anselm, consequently, neglecting any such con- 
 junction as occurs in finite things, has with good reason 
 pronounced that only to be the Perfect which exists 
 not merely in a subjective, but also in an objective 
 mode. It does no good to put on airs against the On- 
 tological proof, as it is called, and against Anselm thus 
 defining the Perfect. The argument is one latent in 
 every unsophisticated mind, and it recurs in every 
 philosophy, even against its wish and without its 
 knowledge — as may be seen in the theory of immediate 
 belief. 
 
 The real fault in the argumentation of Anselm is one 
 which is chargeable on Descartes and Spinoza, as well 
 as on the theory of immediate knowledge. It is this. 
 This unity which is enunciated as the supreme perfec- 
 tion or, it may be, subjectively, as the true knowledge, 
 is pre-supposed, ;', e. it is assumed only as potential. 
 This identity, abstract as it thus appears, between the 
 two categories may be at once met and opposed by their 
 diversity; and this was the very answer given to Anselm 
 long ago. In short, the conception and existence of the 
 finite is set in antagonism to the infinite ; for, as pre- 
 viously remarked, the finite possesses objectivity of 
 such a kind as is at once incongruous with and different 
 from the end or aim, its essence and notion. Or, the 
 finite is such a conception and in sach a way subjective, 
 that it does not involve existence. This objection and 
 this antithesis are got over, only by snowing the finite 
 to be untrue and these categories in their separation to 
 be inadequate and null. Their identity is thus seen to 
 
334 ^^^ DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [193-194. 
 
 be one into which they spontaneously pass over, and in 
 which they are reconciled. 
 
 B. — The Object. 
 
 194.] The Object is immediate being, because in- 
 sensible to difference, which in it has suspended itself. 
 It is, further, a totality in itself, whilst at the same time 
 (as this identity is only the implicit identity of its dynamic 
 elements) it is equally indifferent to its immediate unity. 
 It thus breaks up into distinct parts, each of which is 
 itself the totality. Hence the object is the absolute 
 contradiction between a complete independence of the 
 multiplicity, and the equally complete non-independence 
 of the different pieces. 
 
 The'definition, which states that the Absolute is the 
 Object, is most definitely implied in the Leibnitzian 
 Monad. The Monads are each an object, but an object 
 implicitly 'representative,' indeed the total representa- 
 tion of the world. In the simple unity of the Monad, all 
 difference is merely ideal, not independent or real. 
 Nothing from without comes into the monad : It is the 
 whole notion in itself, only distinguished by its own 
 greater or less development. None the less, this simple 
 totality parts into the absolute multeity of differences, 
 each becoming an independent monad. In the monad 
 of monads, and the Pre-established Harmony of their 
 inward developments, these substances are in like 
 manner again reduced to 'ideality' and unsubstantiality. 
 The philosophy of Leibnitz, therefore, represents con- 
 tradiction in its complete development. 
 
 As Fichte in modern times has especially and with justice 
 insisted, the theory which regards the Absolute or God as 
 the Object and there stops, expresses the point of view taken 
 by superstition and slavish fear. No doubt God is the 
 Object, and, indeed, the Object out and out, confronted with 
 
194.] THE OBJECT. 335 
 
 which our particular or subjective opinions and desires have 
 no truth and no validity. As absolute object however, 
 God does not therefore take up the position of a dark and 
 hostile power over against subjectivity. He rather involves 
 it as a vital element in Himself Such also is the meaning of 
 the Christian doctrine, according to which God has willed 
 that all men should be saved and all attain blessedness. The 
 salvation and the blessedness of men are attained when they 
 come to feel themselves at one with God, so that God, on the 
 other hand, ceases to be for them mere object, and, in that 
 way, an object of fear and terror, as was especially the case 
 with the religious consciousness of the Romans. But God 
 in the Christian religion is also known as Love, because in 
 His Son, who is one with Him, He has revealed Himself to 
 men as a man amongst men, and thereby redeemed them. 
 All which is only another way of saying that the antithesis 
 of subjective and objective is implicitly overcome, and that it 
 is our affair to participate in this redemption by laying aside 
 our immediate subjectivity (putting off the old Adam), and 
 learning to know God as our true and essential self. 
 
 Just as religion and religious worship consist in overcom- 
 ing the antithesis of subjectivity and objectivity, so science 
 too and philosophy have no other task than to overcome this 
 antithesis by the medium of thought. The aim of knowledge 
 is to divest the objective world that stands opposed to us of 
 its strangeness, and, as the phrase is, to find ourselves at 
 home in it : which means no more than to trace the objective 
 world back to the notion, — to our innermost self We may 
 learn from the present discussion the mistake of regarding 
 the antithesis of subjectivity and objectivity as an abstract 
 and permanent one. The two are wholly dialectical. The 
 notion is at first only subjective : but without the assistance 
 of any foreign material or stuff it proceeds, in obedience to 
 its own action, to objectify itself So, too, the object is not 
 rigid and processless. Its process is to show itself as what 
 is at the same time subjective, and thus form the step onwards 
 to the idea. Any one whoj from want of familiarity with the 
 categories of subjectivity and objectivity, seeks to retain them 
 in their abstraction, will find that the isolated categories slip 
 
336 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [i94-i95- 
 
 through his fingers before he is aware, and that he says the 
 exact contrary of what he wanted to say. 
 
 (2) Objectivity contains the three forms of Mechanism, 
 Chemism, and Teleology. The object of mechanical type is 
 the immediate and undifferentiated object. No doubt it con- 
 tains difference, but the different pieces stand, as it were, 
 without affmity to each other, and their connexion is only 
 extraneous. In chemism, on the contrary, the object exhibits 
 an essential tendency to differentiation, in such a way that 
 the objects are what they are only by their relation to each 
 other: this tendency to difference constitutes their quahty. 
 The third type of objectivity, the teleological relation, is the 
 unity of mechanism and chemism. Design, like the me- 
 chanical object, is a self-contained totality, enriched however 
 by the principle of differentiation which came to the fore in 
 chemism, and thus referring itself to the object that stands 
 over against it. Finally, it is the realisation of design which 
 forms the transition to the Idea. 
 
 {a) Mechanism. 
 
 196.] The object (i) in its immediacy is the notion 
 only potentially ; the notion as subjective is primarily 
 outside it ; and all its specific character is imposed from 
 without. As a unity of differents^ therefore, it is a com- 
 posite, an aggregate ; and its capacity of acting on any- 
 thing else continues to be an external relation. This is 
 Formal Mechanism. — Notwithstanding, and in this con- 
 nexion and non-independence, the objects remain inde- 
 pendent and offer resistance, external to each other. 
 
 Pressure and impact are examples of mechanical 
 relations. Our knowledge is said to be mechanical or 
 by rote, when the words have no meaning for us, but 
 continue external to sense, conception, thought; and 
 when, being similarly external to each other, they form 
 a meaningless sequence. Conduct, piety, &c. are in the 
 same way mechanical, when a man's behaviour is settled 
 for him by ceremonial laws, by a spiritual adviser, &c. ; 
 
195-] MECHANISM. 337 
 
 in short, when his own mind and will are not in his 
 actions, which in this way are extraneous to himself. 
 
 Mechanism, the first form of objectivity, is also the category 
 which primarily offers itself to reflection, as it examines the 
 objective world. It is also the category beyond which re- 
 flection seldom goes. It is, however, a shallow and super- 
 ficial mode of observation, one that cannot carry us through 
 in connexion with Nature and still less in connexion with 
 the world of Mind. In Nature it is only the veriest abstract 
 relations of matter in its inert masses which obey the law of 
 mechanism. On the contrary the phenomena and operations 
 of the province to which the term ' physical ' in its narrower 
 sense is applied, such as the phenomena of light, heat, mag- 
 netism, and electricity, cannot be explained by any mere 
 mechanical processes, such as pressure, impact, displace- 
 ment of parts, and the like. Still less satisfactory is it to 
 transfer these categories and apply them in the field of 
 organic nature ; at least if it be our aim to understand the 
 specific features of that field, such as the growth and nourish- 
 ment of plants, or, it may be, even animal sensation. It is 
 at any rate a very deep-seated, and perhaps the main, defect 
 of modern researches into nature, that, even where other and 
 higher categories than those of mere mechanism are in 
 operation, they still stick obstinately to the mechanical 
 laws ; although they thus conflict with the testimony of 
 unbiassed perception, and foreclose the gate to an- adequate 
 knowledge of nature. But even in considering the formations 
 in the world of Mind, the mechanical theory has been re- 
 peatedly invested with an authority which it has no right to. 
 Take as an instance the remark that man consists of soul 
 and body. In this language, the two things stand each self- 
 subsistent, and associated only from without. Similarly we 
 find the soul regarded as a mere group of forces and faculties, 
 subsisting independently side by side. 
 
 Thus decidedly must we reject the mechanical mode of in- 
 quiry when it comes forward and arrogates to itself the place 
 of rational cognition in general, and seeks to get mechanism 
 accepted as an absolute category. But we must not on that 
 account forget expressly to vindicate for mechanism the 
 
 VOL. II. z 
 
338 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [195. 
 
 right and import of a general logical category. It would be, 
 therefore, a mistake to restrict it to the special physical 
 department from which it derives its name. There is no 
 harm done, for example, in directing attention to mechanical 
 actions, such as that of gravity, the lever, &c., even in de- 
 partments, notably in physics and in physiology, beyond the 
 range of mechanics proper. It must however be remembered, 
 that within these spheres the laws of mechanism cease to be 
 final or decisive, and sink, as it were, to a subservient 
 position. To which may be added, that, in Nature, when the 
 higher or organic functions are in any way checked or dis- 
 turbed in their normal efficiency, the otherwise subordinate 
 category of mechanism is immediately seen to take the upper 
 hand. Thus a sufferer from indigestion feels pressure on the 
 stomach, after partaking of certain food in slight quantity ; 
 whereas those whose digestive organs are sound remain free 
 from the sensation, although they have eaten as much. The 
 same phenomenon occurs in the general feeling of heaviness 
 in the limbs, experienced in bodily indisposition. Even in 
 the world of Mind, mechanism has its place ; though there, 
 too, it is a subordinate one. We are right in speaking of 
 mechanical memory, and all sorts of mechanical operations, 
 such as reading, writing, playing on musical instruments, 
 &c. In memory, indeed, the mechanical quality of the 
 action is essential : a circumstance, the neglect of which has 
 not unfrequently caused great harm in the training of the 
 young, from the misapplied zeal of modern educationalists 
 for the freedom of intelligence. It would betray bad 
 psychology, however, to have recourse to mechanism for an 
 explanation of the nature of memory, and to apply mechanical 
 laws straight off to the soul. The mechanical feature in 
 memory lies m.erely in the fact that certain signs, tones, &c. 
 are apprehended in their purely external association, and 
 then reproduced in this association, without attention being 
 expressly directed to their meaning and inward association. 
 To become acquainted with these conditions of mechanical 
 memory requires no further study of mechanics, nor would 
 that study tend .at all to advance the special inquiry of 
 psychology. 
 
196-198.] MECHANISM. 339 
 
 196.] The want of stability in itself which allov/s the 
 object to suffer violence, is possessed by it (see preced- 
 ing §) only in so far as it has a certain stability. Now 
 as the object is implicitly invested with the character of 
 notion, the one of these characteristics is not merged 
 into its other ; but the object, through the negation of 
 itself (its lack of independence), closes with itself, and 
 not till it so closes, is it independent. Thus at the same 
 time in distinction from the outwardness, and negativing 
 that outwardness in its independence, does this inde- 
 pendence form a negative unity with self, — Centrality 
 (subjectivity). So conceived, the object itself has direc- 
 tion and reference towards the external. But this 
 external object is similarly central in itself, and being so, 
 is no less only referred towards the other centre ; so that 
 it no less has its centrality in the other. This is (2) 
 Mechanism with Afilnity (with bias, or ' difference '), 
 and may be illustrated by gravitation, appetite, social 
 instinct, &c. 
 
 197.] This relationship, when fully carried out, forms* 
 a syllogism. In that syllogism the immanent negativity, 
 as the central individuality of an object, (abstract centre,) 
 relates itself to non-independent objects, as the other 
 extreme, by a mean which unites the centrality with the 
 non-independence of the objects, (relative c^'ntre.) This 
 is (3) Absolute Mechanism. 
 
 198.] The syllogism thus indicated (I — P — U) is a 
 triad of syllogisms. The wrong individuality of non- 
 independent objects, in which formal Mechanism is at 
 home, is, by reason of that non-independence, no less 
 universality, though it be only external. Hence these 
 objects also form the mean between the absolute and 
 the relative centre (the form of syllogism being U — I — P): 
 for it is by this want of independence that those two are 
 kept asunder and made extremes, as well as related to 
 z 2 
 
340 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [198-199. 
 
 one another. Similarly absolute centrality, as the per- 
 manently-underlying universal substance (illustrated by 
 the gravity which continues identical), which as pure 
 negativity equally includes individuality in it, is what 
 mediates between the relative centre and the non-inde- 
 pendent objects (the form of syllogism being P — U — I). 
 It does so no less essentially as a disintegrating force, 
 in its character of immanent individuality, than in virtue 
 of universality, acting as an identical bond of union and 
 tranquil self-containedness. 
 
 Like the solar system, so for example in the practical 
 sphere the state is a system of three syllogisms, (i) The 
 Individual or person, through his particularity or physi- 
 cal or mental needs (which when carried out to their 
 full development give civil society), is coupled with the 
 universal, i. e. with society, law, right, government. 
 (2) The will or action of the individuals is the inter- 
 mediating force which procures for these needs satis- 
 faction in society, in law, &c., and which gives to society, 
 law, &c. their fulfilment and actualisation. (3) But the 
 universal, that is to say the state, government, and law, 
 is the permanent underlying mean in which the indi- 
 viduals and their satisfaction have and receive their 
 fulfilled reality, inter-mediation, and persistence. Each 
 of the functions of the notion, as it is brought by inter- 
 mediation to coalesce with the other extreme, is brought 
 into union with itself and produces itself: which pro- 
 duction is self-preservation. — It is only by the nature of 
 this triple coupling, by this triad of syllogisms with the 
 same termini, that a whole is thoroughly understood in 
 its organisation. 
 
 199.] The immediacy of existence, which the objects 
 have in Absolute Mechanism, is implicitly negatived by 
 the fact that their independence is derived from, and due 
 to, their connexions with each other, and therefore to 
 
X99-aoo.] CHEMISM. 34I 
 
 their own want of stability. Thus the object must be 
 explicitly stated as in its existence having an Affinity 
 (or a bias) towards its other, — as not-indiflferent. 
 
 {b) Cliemism. 
 
 200.] The not-indifferent (biassed) object has an 
 immanent mode which constitutes its nature, and in 
 which it has existence. But as it is invested with the 
 character of total notion, it is the contradiction between 
 this totality and the special mode of its existence. 
 Consequently it is the constant endeavour to cancel this 
 contradiction and to make its definite being equal to the 
 notion. 
 
 Chemism is a category of objectivity which, as a rule, is 
 not particularly emphasised, and is generally put under the 
 head of mechanism. The common name of mechanical 
 relationship is applied to both, in contra-distinction to the 
 teleological. There is a reason for this in the common 
 feature which belongs to mechanism and chemism. In them 
 the notion exists, but only implicit and latent, and they are 
 thus both marked off from teleology where the notion 
 has real independent existence. This is true : and yet 
 chemism and n>echanism are very decidedly distinct. The 
 object, in the form of mechanism, is primarily only an in- 
 different reference to self, while the chemical object is seen 
 to be completely in reference to something else. No doubt 
 even in mechanism, as it develops itself, there spring up 
 references to something else : but the nexus of mechanical 
 objects with one another is at first only an external nexus, 
 so that the objects in connexion with one another still retain 
 the semblance of independence. In nature, for example; 
 the several celestial bodies, which form our solar system, 
 compose a kinetic system, and thereby show that they are 
 related to one another. Motion, however, as the unity of 
 time and space, is a connexion which is purely abstract and 
 external. And it seems therefore as if these celestial bodies, 
 which are thus externally connected with each other, would 
 
342 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [200-202. 
 
 continue to be what they are, even apart from this reciprocal 
 relation. The case is quite different with chemism. Objects 
 chemically biassed are what they are expressly by that bias 
 alone. Hence they are the absolute impulse towards in- 
 tegration by and in one another. 
 
 201.] The product of the chemical process conse- 
 quently is the Neutral object, latent in the two extremes, 
 each on the alert. The notion or concrete universal, 
 by means of the bias of the objects (the particularity), 
 coalesces with the individuality (in the shape of the 
 product), and in that only with itself. In this process 
 too the other syllogisms are equally involved. The 
 place of mean is taken both by individuality as activity, 
 and by the concrete universal, the essence of the 
 strained extremes ; which essence reaches definite 
 being in the product. 
 
 202.] Chemism, as it is a reflectional nexus of objec- 
 tivity, has pre-supposed, not merely the bias or non- 
 indifferent nature of the objects, but also their immediate 
 independence. The process of chemism consists in 
 passing to and fro from one form to another; which 
 forms continue to be as external as before. — In the 
 neutral product the specific properties, which the ex- 
 tremes bore towards each other, are merged. But 
 although the product is conformable to the notion, the 
 inspiring principle of active differentiation does not exist 
 in it ; for it has sunk back to immediacy. The neutral 
 body is therefore capable of disintegration. But the 
 discerning principle, which breaks up the neutral body 
 into biassed and strained extremes, and which gives to 
 the indifferent object in general its affinity and anima- 
 tion towards another; — that principle, and the process 
 as a separation with tension, falls outside of that first 
 process. 
 
 The chemical process does not rise above a conditioned 
 
3oa-204.] TELEOLOGY. 343 
 
 and finite process. The notion as notion is only the heart 
 and core of the process, and does not in this stage come to 
 an existence of its own. In the neutral product the process 
 is extinct, and the existing cause falls outside it. 
 
 203.] Each of these two processes, the reduction of 
 the biassed (not-indifferent) to the neutral, and the 
 differentiation of the indifferent or neutral, goes its own 
 way without hindrance from the other. But that want 
 of inner connexion shows that they are finite, by their 
 passage into products in which they are merged and lost. 
 Conversely the process exhibits the nonentity of the 
 pre-supposed immediacy of the not-indifferent objects. 
 — By this negation of immediacy and of externalism in 
 which the notion as object was sunk, it is liberated and 
 invested with independent being in face of that exter- 
 nalism and immediacy. In these circumstances it is the 
 End (Final Cause). 
 
 The passage from chemism to the teieological relation is 
 implied in the mutual cancelling of both of the forms of the 
 chemical process. The result thus attained is the liberation 
 of the notion, which in chemism and mechanism was present 
 only in the germ, and not yet evolved. The notion in the 
 shape of the aim or end thus comes into independent 
 existence. 
 
 [c) Teleology. 
 
 204.] In the End the notion has entered on free 
 existence and has a being of its own, by means of the 
 negation of immediate objectivity. It is characterised 
 as subjec!".ve, seeing that this negation is, in the first 
 place, abstract, and hence at first the relation between 
 it and objectivity still one of contrast. This character 
 of subjectivity, however, compared with the totality of 
 the notion, is one-sided, and that, be it added, for the 
 End itself, in which all specific characters have been 
 put as subordinated and merged. For it therefore even 
 
344 ^^^ DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [204. 
 
 the object, which it pre-supposes, has only hypothetical 
 (ideal) reality, — essentially no-reality. The End in 
 short is a contradiction of its self-identity against the 
 negation stated in it, i.e. its antithesis to objectivity, and 
 being so, contains the eliminative or destructive activity 
 which negates the -antithesis and renders it identical 
 with itself. This is the realisation of the End : in 
 which, while it turns itself into the other of its subjec- 
 tivity and objectifies itself, thus cancelling the distinc- 
 tion between the two, it has only closed with itself, and 
 retained itself. 
 
 The .notion of Design or End, while on one hand 
 called redundant, is on another justly described as the 
 rational notion, and contrasted with the abstract uni- 
 versal of understanding. The latter only subsumes the 
 particular, and so connects it with itself: but has it not 
 in its own nature. — The distinction between the End or 
 final cause, and the mere efficient cause (which is the 
 cause ordinarily so called), is of supreme importance. 
 Causes, properly so called, belong to the sphere of 
 necessity, b-nd, and not yet laid bare. The cause 
 therefore appears as passing into its correlative, and 
 losing its primordiality there by sinking into dependency. 
 It is only by implication, or for us, that the cause is in 
 the effect made for the first time a cause, and that 
 it there returns into itself. The End, on the other 
 hand, is expressly stated as containing the specific 
 character in its own self, — the effect, namely, which in 
 the purely causal relation is never free from otherness. 
 The End therefore in its efficiency does not pass over, 
 but retains itself, i.e. it carries into effect itself only, and 
 is at the end what it was in the beginning or primordial 
 state. Until it thus retains itself, it is not genuinely 
 primordial. — The End then requires to be specula- 
 tively apprehended as the notion, which itself in the 
 
ao4.] TELEOLOGY. 345 
 
 proper unity and ideality of its characteristics contains 
 the judgment or negation, — the antithesis of subjective 
 and objective, — and which to an equal extent suspends 
 that antithesis. 
 
 By End however we must not at once, nor must we 
 ever merely, think of the form which it has in conscious- 
 ness as a mode of mere mental representation. By 
 means of the notion of Inner Design Kant has resusci- 
 tated the Idea in general and particularly the idea of 
 life. Aristotle's definition of life virtually implies inner 
 design, and is thus far in advance of the notion of design 
 in modern Teleology, which had in view finite and out- 
 ward design only. 
 
 Animal wants and appetites are some of the readiest 
 instances of the End. They are the felt contradiction, 
 which exists within the living subject, and pass into the 
 activity of negating this negation which mere subjec- 
 tivity-still is. The satisfaction of the want or appetite 
 restores the peace between subject and object. The 
 objective thing which, so long as the contradiction 
 exists, t. e. so long as the want is felt, stands on the 
 other side, loses this quasi-independence, by its union 
 with the subject. Those who talk of the permanence 
 and immutability of the finite, as well subjective as 
 objective, may see the reverse illustrated in the opera- 
 tions of every appetite. Appetite is, so to speak, the 
 conviction that the subjective is only a half-truth, no 
 more adequate than the objective. But appetite in the 
 second place carries out its conviction. It brings about 
 the supersession of these finites : it cancels the antithesis 
 between the objective which would be and stay an ob- 
 jective only, and the subjective which in like manner 
 would be and stay a subjective only. 
 
 As regards the action of the End, attention may be 
 called to the fact, that in the syllogism, which represents 
 
346 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [204-205. 
 
 that action, and shows the end closing with itself by the 
 means of realisation, the radical feature is the negation 
 of the termini. That negation is the one just mentioned 
 both of the immediate subjectivity appearing in the End 
 as such, and of the immediate objectivity as seen in the 
 means and the objects pre-supposed. This is the same 
 negation, as is in operation when the mind leaves the 
 contingent things of the world as well as its own sub- 
 jectivity and rises to God. It is the ' moment ' or factor 
 which (as noticed in the Introduction and § 192) was 
 overlooked and neglected in the analytic form of syllo- 
 gisms, under which the so-called proofs of the Being of 
 a God presented this elevation. 
 
 205.] In its primary and immediate aspect the Teleo- 
 logical relation is external design, and the notion con- 
 fronts a pre-supposed object. The End is consequently 
 finite, and that partly in its content, partly in the cir- 
 cumstance that it has an external condition in the object, 
 which has to be found existing, and which is taken as 
 material for its realisation. Its self-determining is to 
 that extent in form only. The un-mediatedness of the 
 End has the further result that its particularity or con- 
 tent — which as form-characteristic is the subjectivity of 
 the End — is reflected into self, and so different from the 
 totality of the form, subjectivity in general, the notion. 
 This variety constitutes the finitude of Design within its 
 own nature. The content of the End, in this way, is 
 quite as limited, contingent, and given, as the object is 
 particular and found ready to hand. 
 
 Generally speaking, the final cause is taken to mean 
 nothing more than external design. In accordance with this 
 view of it, things are supposed not to carry their vocation in 
 themselves, but merely to be means employed and spent in 
 realising a purpose which lies outside of them. That may 
 be said to be the point of view taken by Utility, which once 
 
205-206.] MEANS AND ENDS. 347 
 
 played a great part even in the sciences, but of late has 
 fallen into merited disrepute, now that people have begun 
 to see that it failed to give a genuine insight into the nature 
 of things. It is true that finite things as finite ought in justice 
 to be viewed as non-ultimate, and as pointing beyond them- 
 selves. This negativity of finite things however is their own 
 dialectic, and in order to ascertain it we must pay attention 
 to their positive content. 
 
 Teleological observations on things often proceed from 
 a well-meant wish to display the wisdom of God as it is 
 especially revealed in nature. Now in thus trying to dis- 
 cover final causes for which the things serve as means, we 
 must remember that we are stopping short at the finite, and 
 are liable to fall into trifling reflections : as, for instance, if we 
 not merely studied the vine in respect of its well-known use 
 for man, but proceeded to consider the cork-tree in con- 
 nexion with the corks which are cut from its bark to put into 
 the wine-bottles. Whole books used to be written in this 
 spirit. It is easy to see that they promoted the genuine 
 interest neither of religion nor of science. External design 
 stands immediately in front of the idea : but what thus 
 stands on the threshold often for that reason is least ade- 
 quate. 
 
 206.] The teleological relation is a syllogism in 
 which the subjective end coalesces with the objectivity 
 external to it, through a middle term which is the unity 
 of both. This unity is on one hand the purposive action, 
 on the other the Means, i. e. objectivity made directly 
 subservient to purpose. 
 
 The development from End to Idea ensues by three 
 stages, first, Subjective End ; second. End in process of 
 accomplishment; and th rd, EJnd accomplished. First of all 
 we have the Subjective End ; and that, as the notion in 
 independent being, is itself the totality of the elementary 
 functions of the notion. The first of these functions is that 
 of self-identical universality, as it were the neutral first 
 water, in which everything is involved, but nothing as yet 
 discriminated. The second of these elements is the particu- 
 
348 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [ao6-ao8. 
 
 larising of this universal, by which it acquires a specific con- 
 tent. As this specific content again is reaUsed by the 
 agency of the universal, the latter returns by its means back 
 to itself, and coalesces with itself. Hence too when we set 
 some end before us, we say that we ' conclude ' to do some- 
 thing: a phrase which implies that we were, so to speak, 
 open and accessible to this or that determination. Similarly 
 we also at a further step speak of a man ' resolving ' to do 
 something, meaning that the agent steps forward out of his 
 self-regarding inwardness and, enters into dealings with the 
 environing objectivity. This supplies the step from the merely 
 Subjective End to the purposive action which tends outwards. 
 
 207.] (i) The first syllogism of the final cause repre- 
 sents the Subjective End. The universal notion is 
 brought to unite with individuality by means of particu- 
 larity, so that the individual as self-determination acts 
 as judge. That is to say, it not only particularises 
 or makes into a determinate content the still indeter- 
 minate universal, but also explicitly puts an antithesis 
 of subjectivity and objectivity, and at the same time is in 
 its own self a return to itself; for it stamps the subjec- 
 tivity of the notion, pre-supposed as against objectivity, 
 with the mark of defect, in comparison with the complete 
 and rounded totality, and thereby at the same time turns 
 outwards. 
 
 208.] (2) This action which is directed outwards is 
 the individuality, which in the Subjective End is identical 
 with the particularity under which, along with the con- 
 tent, is also comprised the external objectivity. It 
 throws itself in the first place immediately upon the 
 object, which it appropriates to itself as a Means. The 
 notion is this immediate power; for the notion is the 
 self-identical negativity, in which the being of the object 
 is characterised as wholly and merely ideal. — The whole 
 Means then is this inward power of the notion, in the 
 shape of an agency, with which the object as Means is 
 
flo8-ao9.] MEANS AND ENDS. 349 
 
 * immediately ' united and in obedience to which it 
 stands. 
 
 In finite teleology the Means is thus broken up into 
 two elements external to each other, (a) the action and 
 {b) the object which serves as Means. The relation of 
 the final cause as power to this object, and the subjuga- 
 tion of the object to it, is immediate (it forms the first 
 premiss in the syllogism) to this extent, that in the 
 teleological notion as the self-existent ideality the object 
 is put as potentially null. This relation, as represented 
 in the first premiss, itself becomes the Means, which at 
 the same time involves the syllogism, that through this 
 relation — in which the action of the End is contained 
 and dominant — the End is coupled with objectivity. 
 
 The execution of the End is the mediated mode of realising 
 the End ; but the immediate realisation is not less needful. 
 The End lays hold of the object immediately, because it is 
 the power over the object, because in the End particularity, 
 and in particularity objectivity also, is involved. — A living 
 being has a body ; the soul takes possession of it and with- 
 out intermediary has objectified itself in it. The human soul 
 has much to do, before it makes its corporeal nature into a 
 means. Man must, as it were, take possession of his body, 
 so that it may be the instrument of his soul. 
 
 209.] (3) Purposive action, with its Means, is still 
 directed outwards, because the End is also not identical 
 with the object, and must consequently first be mediated 
 with it. The Means in its capacity of object stands, in 
 this second premiss, in direct relation to the other 
 extreme of the syllogism, namely, the material or ob- 
 jectivity which is pre-supposed. This relation is the 
 sphere of chemism and mechanisrrl, which have now 
 become the servants of the Final Cause, where lies 
 their truth and free notion. Thus the Subjective End, 
 which is the power ruling these processes, in which the 
 
350 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [209-aii. 
 
 objective things wear themselves out on one another, 
 contrives to keep itself free from them, and to preserve 
 itself in them. Doing so, it appears as the Cunning of 
 
 Reason is as cunning as it is powerful. Cunning may be 
 said to lie in the inter-mediative action which, while it 
 permits the objects to follow their own bent and act upon 
 one another till they waste away, and does not itself 
 directly interfere in the process, is nevertheless only work- 
 ing out its own aims. With this explanation, Divine Provi- 
 dence may be said to stand to the world and its process in 
 the capacity of absolute cnnning. God lets men do as they 
 please with their particular passions and interests ; but the 
 result is the accomplishment of— not their plans, but His, and 
 these differ decidedly from the ends primarily sought by 
 those whom He employs. 
 
 210.] The realised End is thus the overt unity of 
 subjective and objective. It is however essentially 
 characteristic of this unity, that the subjective and 
 objective are neutralised and cancelled only in the point 
 of their one-sidedness, while the objective is subdued 
 and made conformable to the End, as the free notion, 
 and thereby to the power above it. The End maintains 
 itself against and in the objective : for it is no mere 
 one-sided subjective or particular, it is also the concrete 
 universal, the implicit identity of both. This universal, 
 as simply reflected in itself, is the content which remains 
 unchanged through all the three termini of the syllogism 
 and their movement. 
 
 211.] In finite design, however, even the executed 
 End has the same radical rift or flaw as had the Means 
 and the initial End. We have got therefore only a form 
 extraneously impressed on a pre-existing material : and 
 this form, by reason of the limited content of the End, 
 is also a contingent characteristic. The End achieved 
 
211-213.] MEANS AND ENDS. 35 1 
 
 consequently is only an object, which again becomes 
 a Means or material for other Ends, and so on for 
 ever. 
 
 212.] But what virtually happens in the realising of the 
 End is that the one-sided subjectivity and the show of ob- 
 jective independence confronting it are both cancelled. 
 In laying hold of the means, the notion constitutes itself 
 the very implicit essence of the object. In the mechani- 
 cal and chemical processes the independence of the 
 object has been already dissipated implicitly, and in the 
 course of their movement under the dominion of the 
 End, the show of that independence, the negative which 
 confronts the notion, is got rid of But in the fact that 
 the End achieved is characterised only as a Means and 
 a material, this object, viz, the teleological, is there and 
 then put as implicitly null, and only ' ideal.' This being 
 so, the antithesis between form and content has also 
 vanished. While the End by the removal and absorp- 
 tion of all form-characteristics coalesces with itself, the 
 form as self-identical is thereby put as the content, so 
 that the notion, which is the action of form, has only 
 itself for content. Through this process, therefore, 
 there is made explicitly manifest what was the notion of 
 design : viz. the implicit unity of subjective and objec- 
 tive is now realised. And this is the Idea. 
 
 This finitude of the End consists in the circumstance, that, 
 in the process of realising it, the material, which is employed 
 as a means, is only externally subsumed under it and made 
 conformable to it. But, as a matter of fact, the object is the 
 notion implicitly : and thus when the notion, in the shape of 
 End, is realised in the object, we have but the manifestation 
 of the inner nature of the object itself. Objectivity is thus, 
 as It were, only a covering under which the notion lies con- 
 cealed. Within the range of the finite we can never see or 
 experience that th^ End has been really secured. The con- 
 summation of the infinite End, therefore, consists merely in 
 
352 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [212-213. 
 
 removing the illusion which makes it seem yet unaccom- 
 plished. The Good, the absolutely Good, is eternally 
 accomplishing itself in the world : and the result is that it 
 needs not wait upon us, but is already by implication, as 
 well as in full actuality, accomplished. This is the illusion 
 under which we live. It alone supplie* at the same time 
 the actualising force on which the interest in the world 
 reposes. In the -course of its process the Idea creates 
 that illusion, by setting an antithesis to confront it ; and its 
 action consists in getting rid of the illusion which it has 
 created. Only out of this error does the truth arise. In 
 this fact lies the reconciliation with error and with finitude. 
 Error or other-being, when superseded, is still a necessary 
 dynamic element of truth : for truth can only be where it 
 makes itself its own result. 
 
 C— The Idea. 
 
 213.] The Idea is truth in itself and for itself, — the 
 absolute unity of the notion and objectivity. Its ' ideal ' 
 content is nothing but the notion in its detailed terms : 
 its 'real' content is only the exhibition which the notion 
 gives itself in the form of external existence, whilst yet, 
 by enclosing this shape in its ideality, it keeps it in its 
 power, and so keeps itself in it. 
 
 The definition, which declares the Absolute to be the 
 Idea, is itself absolute. All former definitions come 
 back to this. The Idea is the Truth : for Truth is the 
 correspondence of objectivity with the notion :— not of 
 course the correspondence of external things with my 
 conceptions, — for these are only correct conceptions 
 held by me, the individual person. In the idea we have 
 nothing to do with the individual, nor with figurate con- 
 ceptions, nor with external things. And yet, again, 
 everything actual, in so far as it is true, is the Idea, and 
 has its truth by and in virtue of the Idea alone. Every 
 individual being is some one aspect of the Idea : for 
 
2 IS-] THE IDEA. 353 
 
 which, therefore, yet other actualities are needed, which 
 in their turn appear to have a self-subsistence of their 
 own. It is only in them altogether and in their relation 
 that the notion is realised. The individual by itself 
 does not correspond to its notion. It is this limitation 
 of its existence which constitutes the finitude and the 
 ruin of the individual. 
 
 The Idea itself is not to be taken as an idea of some- 
 thing or other, any more than the notion is to be taken 
 as merely a specific notion. The Absolute is the uni- 
 versal and one idea, which, by an act of 'judgment,' 
 particularises itself to the system of specific ideas ; 
 which after all are constrained by their nature to come 
 back to the one idea where their truth lies. As issued 
 out of this 'judgment' the Idea is in the first place only 
 the one universal substance : but its developed and 
 genuine actuality is to be as a subject and in that way as 
 mind. 
 
 Because it has no existence for starting-point and point 
 cTappui, the Idea is frequently treated as a mere logical 
 form. Such a view must be abandoned to those theories, 
 which ascribe so-called reality and genuine actuality to 
 the existent thing and all the other categories which 
 have not yet penetrated as far as the Idea. It is no 
 less false to imagine the Idea to be mere abstraction. 
 It is abstract certainly, in so far as everything untrue is 
 consumed in it : but in its own self it is essentially con- 
 crete, because it is the free notion giving character to 
 itself, and that character, reality. It would be an 
 abstract form, only if the notion, which is its principle, 
 were taken as an abstract unity, and not as the nega- 
 tive return of it into self and as the subjectivity which 
 it really is. 
 
 Truth is at first taken to mean that I know how something 
 15. This is truth, however, only in reference to conscious- 
 VOL. II. A a 
 
354 T^^ DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [213. 
 
 ness ; it is formal truth, bare correctness. Truth in the 
 deeper sense consists in the identity between objectivity and 
 the notion. It is in this deeper sense of truth that' we speak 
 of a true state, or of a true work of art. These objects 
 are true, if they are as they ought to be, i.e. if their reality 
 corresponds to their notion. When thus viewed, to be untrue 
 means much the same as to be bad. A bad man is an 
 untrue man, a man who does not behave as his notion or his 
 vocation requires. Nothing however can subsist, if it be 
 wholly devoid of identity between the notion and reality. 
 Even bad and untrue things have being, in so far as their 
 reality still, somehow, conforms to their notion. What- 
 ever is thoroughly bad or contrary to the notion, is for that 
 very reason on the way to ruin. It is by the notion 
 alone that the things in the world have their subsistence ; 
 or, as it is expressed in the language of religious conception, 
 things are what they are, only in virtue of the divine and 
 thereby creative thought which dwells within them. 
 
 When we hear the Idea spoken of, we need not imagine 
 something far away beyond this mortal sphere. The idea is 
 rather what is completely present : and it is found, however 
 confused and degenerated, in every consciousness. We 
 conceive the world to ourselves as a great totality which is 
 created by God, and so created that in it God has manifested 
 Himself to us. We regard the world also as ruled by 
 Divine Providence : implying that the scattered and divided 
 parts of the world are continually brought back, and made 
 conformable, to the unity from which they have issued. 
 The purpose of philosophy has always been the intellec- 
 tual ascertainment of the Idea ; and everything deserving 
 the name of philosophy has constantly been based on 
 the consciousness of an absolute unity where the under- 
 standing sees and accepts only separation.— It is too 
 late now to ask for proof that the Idea is the truth. The 
 proof of that is contained in the whole deduction and 
 development of thought up to this point. The idea is the 
 result of this course of dialectic. Not that it is to be sup- 
 posed that the idea is mediate only, i.e. mediated through 
 something else than itself. It is rather its own result, and 
 
213-214.] THE IDEA. 355 
 
 being so, is no less immediate than mediate. The stages 
 hitherto considered, viz. those of Being an-^ Essence, as well 
 as those of Notion and of Objectivity, are not, when so 
 distinguished, something permanent, resting upon them- 
 selves. They have proved to be dialectical ; and their only 
 truth is that they are dynamic elements of the idea. 
 
 214.] The Idea may be described in many ways. It 
 may be called reason (and this is the proper philo- 
 sophical signification of reason) ; subject-object ; the 
 unity of the ideal and the real, of the finite and the in- 
 finite, of soul and body ; the possibility which has its 
 actuality in its own self; that of which the nature can 
 be thought only as existent, &c. All these descriptions 
 apply, because the Idea contains all the relations of 
 understanding, but contains them in their infinite self- 
 return and self-identity. 
 
 It is easy work for the understanding to show that 
 everything said of the Idea is self-contradictory. But 
 that can quite as well be retaliated, or rather in the 
 Idea the retaliation is actually made. And this work, 
 which is the work of reason, is certainly not so easy 
 as that of the understanding. Understanding may 
 demonstrate that the Idea is self-contradictory : because 
 the subjective is subjective only and is always confronted 
 by the objective, — because being is different from notion 
 and therefore cannot be picked out of it — because the 
 finite is finite only, the exact antithesis of the infinite, 
 and therefore not identical with it ; and so on with every 
 term of the description. The reverse of all this however 
 is the doctrine of Logic. Logic shows that the subjec- 
 tive which is to be subjective only, the finite which 
 would be finite only, the infinite which would be infinite 
 only, and so on, have no truth, but contradict them- 
 selves, and pass over into their opposites. Hence this 
 transition, and the unity in which the extremes are 
 A a 2 
 
356 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [214. 
 
 merged and become factors, each with a merely reflected 
 existence, reveals itself as their truth. 
 
 The understanding, which addresses itself to deal 
 with the Idea, commits a double misunderstanding. It 
 takes y?rs/ the extremes of the Idea (be they expressed 
 as they will, so long as they are in their unity), not as 
 they are understood when stamped with this concrete 
 unity, but as if they remained abstractions outside of it. 
 It no less mistakes the relation between them, ever 
 when it has been expressly stated. Thus, for example, 
 it overlooks even the nature of the copula in the judg 
 ment, which, affirms that the individual, or subject, is 
 after all not individual, but universal. But, in the 
 second place, the understanding believes /'/5 'reflection,' — 
 that the self-identical Idea contains its own negative, or 
 contains contradiction, — to be an external reflection 
 which does not lie within the Idea itself. But the 
 reflection is really no peculiar cleverness of the under- 
 standing. The Idea itself is the dialectic which for 
 ever divides and distinguishes the self-identical from 
 the differentiated, the subjective from the objective, the 
 finite from the infinite, soul from body. Only on these 
 terms is it an eternal creation, eternal vitality, and 
 eternal spirit. But while it thus passes or rather trans- 
 lates itself into the abstract understanding, it for ever 
 remains reason. The Idea is the dialectic which again 
 makes this mass of understanding and diversity under- 
 stand its finite nature and the pseudo-independence in 
 its productions, and which brings the diversity back to 
 unity. Since this double movement is not separate or 
 distinct in time, nor indeed in any other way— otherwise 
 it would be only a repetition of the abstract understand- 
 ing — the Idea is the eternal vision of itself in the other, 
 — notion which in its objectivity has carried out itself, — 
 object which is inward design, essential subjectivity. 
 
214-215.] THE IDEA. 357 
 
 The different modes of apprehending the Idea as 
 unity of ideal and real, of finite and infinite, of identity 
 and difference, &c. are more or less formal. They 
 designate some one stage of the specific notion. Only 
 the notion itself, however, is free and the genuine uni- 
 versal : in the Idea, therefore, the specific character of 
 the notion is only the notion itself, — an objectivity, viz. 
 into which it, being the universal, continues itself, and 
 in which it has only its own character, the total character. 
 The Idea is the infinite judgment^ of which the terms 
 are severally the independent totality ; and in which, as 
 each grows to the fulness of its own nature, it has 
 thereby at the same time passed into the other. None 
 of the other specific notions exhibits this totality 
 complete on both its sides as the notion itself and 
 objectivity. 
 
 215.] The Idea is essentially a process, because its 
 identity is the absolute and free identity of the notion, 
 only in so far as it is absolute negativity and for that 
 reason dialectical. It is the round of movement, in 
 which the notion, in the capacity of universality which 
 is individuality, gives itself the character of objectivity 
 and of the antithesis thereto ; and this externality which 
 has the notion for its substance, finds its way back to 
 subjectivity through its immanent dialectic. 
 
 As the idea is (a) a process, it follows that such an ex- 
 pression for the Absolute as unity of thought and 
 being, of finite and infinite, &c. is false ; for unity 
 expresses an abstract and merely quiescent identity. 
 As the Idea is {b) subjectivity, it follows that the expres- 
 sion is equally false on another account. That unity of 
 which it speaks expresses a merely virtual or underlying 
 presence of the genuine unity. The infinite would thus 
 seem to be merely neutralised by the finite, the subjective 
 by the objective, thought by being. But in the negative 
 
358 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [215-216. 
 
 unity of the Idea, the infinite overlaps and includes the 
 finite, thought overlaps being, subjectivity overlaps ob- 
 jectivity. The unity of the Idea is thought, infinity, and 
 subjectivity, and is in consequence to be essentially dis- 
 tinguished from the Idea as substance, just as this over- 
 lapping subjectivity, thought, or infinity is to be distin- 
 guished from the one-sided subjectivity, one-sided 
 thought, one-sided infinity to which it descends in 
 judging and defining. 
 
 The idea as a process runs through three stages in its 
 development. The first form of the idea is Life : that is, the 
 idea in the form of immediacy. The second form is that of 
 mediation or differentiation ; and this is the idea in the form 
 of Knowledge, which appears under the double aspect of the 
 Theoretical and Practical idea. The process of knowledge 
 eventuates in the restoration of the unity enriched by differ- 
 ence. This gives the third form of the idea, the Absolute 
 Idea : which last stage of the logical idea evinces itself to be 
 at the same time the true first, and to have a being due to 
 itself alone. 
 
 {a) Life. 
 
 216.] The immediate idea is Life. As soul, the notion 
 is realised in a body of whose externality the soul is 
 the immediate self-relating universality. But the soul is 
 also its particularisation, so that the body expresses no 
 other distinctions than follow from the char-^.cterisations 
 of its notion. And finally it is the Individuality of the 
 body as infinite negativity, — the dialectic of that bodily 
 objectivity, with its parts lying out of one another, con- 
 veying them away from the semblance of independent 
 subsistence back into subjectivity, so that all the mem- 
 bers are reciprocally momentary means as well as 
 momentary ends. Thus as life is the initial particu- 
 larisation, so it results in the negative self-asserting unity: 
 in the dialectic of its corporeity it only coalesces with 
 
216-2.8.] LIFE. 359 
 
 itself. In this way life is essentially something alive, 
 and in point of its immediacy this individual living thing. 
 It is characteristic of finitude in this sphere that, by 
 reason of the immediacy of the idea, body and soul are 
 separable. This constitutes the mortality of the living 
 being. It is only, however, when the living being is 
 dead, that these two sides of the idea are different 
 ingredients. 
 
 The single members of the body are what they are only 
 by and in relation to their unity. A hand e.g. when hewn 
 oflF from the body is, as Aristotle has observed, a hand in 
 name only, not in fact. From the point of view of under- 
 standing, Hfe is usually spoken of as a mystery, and in 
 general as incomprehensible. By giving it such a name, 
 however, the Understanding only confesses itr own finitude 
 and nullity. So far is life from being incomprehensible, that 
 in it the very notion is'presented to us, or rather the imme- 
 diate idea existing as a notion. And having said this, we have 
 indicated the defect of life. Its notion and reality do not 
 thoroughly correspond to each other. The notion of life is 
 the soul, and this notion has the body for its reality. The 
 soul is, as it were, infused into its corporeity ; and in that 
 way it is at first sentient only, and not yet freely self- 
 conscious. The process of life consists in getting the better 
 of the immediacy with which it is still beset : and this pro- 
 cess, which is itself threefold, results in the idea under the 
 form of judgment, i.e. the idea as Cognition. 
 
 217.] A living being is a syllogism, of which the very 
 elements are in themselves systems and syllogisms 
 (§§ 198, 201, 207). They are however active syllogisms 
 or processes ; and in the subjective unity of the vital 
 agent make only one process. Thus the living being is 
 the process of its coalescence with itself, which runs on 
 through three processes. 
 
 218.] (i) The first is the process of the living being 
 inside itself. In that process it makes a split on its own 
 
360 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [218-219. 
 
 self, and reduces its corporeity to its object or its in- 
 organic nature. This corporeity, as an aggregate of 
 correlations, enters in its very nature into difference and 
 opposition of its elements, which mutually become each 
 other's prey, and assimilate one another, and are re- 
 tained by producing themselves. Yet this action of the 
 several members (organs), is only the living subject's 
 one act to which their productions revert ; so that in 
 these productions nothing is produced except the sub- 
 ject : in other words, the subject only reproduces itself. 
 
 The process of the vital subject within its own limits has 
 in Nature the threefold form of Sensibility, Irritability, and 
 Reproduction. As Sensibility, the living being is immedi- 
 ately simple self-relation — it is the soul omnipresent in its 
 body, the outsideness of each member of which to others 
 has for it no truth. As Irritability, the living being appears 
 split up in itself; and as Reproduction, it is perpetually 
 restoring itself from the inner distinction of its members 
 and organs. A vital agent only exists as this continually 
 self-renewing process within its own limits. 
 
 219.] (2) But the judgment of the notion proceeds, as 
 free, to discharge the objective or bodily nature as an 
 independent totality from itself; and the negative rela- 
 tion of the living thing to itself makes, as immediate 
 individuality, the pre-supposition of an inorganic nature 
 confronting it. As this negative of the animate is no 
 less a function in the notion of the animate itself, it 
 exists consequently in the latter (which is at the same 
 time a concrete universal) in the shape of a defect or 
 want. The dialectic by which the object, being implicitly 
 null, is merged, is the action of the self-assured living 
 thing, which in this process against an inorganic nature 
 thus retains, develops, and objectifies itself. 
 
 The living being stands face to face, with an inorganic 
 nature, to which it comports itself as a master and which it 
 
a [9-221.] LIFE. 361 
 
 assimilates to itself. The result of the assimilation is not, as 
 in the chemical process, a neutral product in which the inde- 
 pendence of the two confronting sides is merged ; but the 
 living being shows itself as large enough to embrace its 
 other which cannot withstand its power. The inorganic 
 nature which is subdued by the vital agent suffers this fate, 
 because it is virtually the same as what life is actually. Thus 
 in the other the living being only coalesces with itself. But 
 when the soul has fled from the body, the elementary 
 powers of objectivity begin their play. These powers are, 
 as it were, continually on the spring, ready to begin their 
 process in the organic body ; and life is the constant battle 
 against them. 
 
 220.] (3) The living individual, which in its first 
 process comports itself as intrinsically subject and 
 notion, through its second assimilates its external objec- 
 tivity and thus puts the character of reality into itself. 
 It is now therefore implicitly a Kind, with essential 
 universality of nature. The particularising of this Kind 
 is the relation of the living subject to another subject of 
 its Kind : and the judgment is the tie of Kind over 
 these individuals thus appointed for each other. This 
 is the Affinity of the Sexes. 
 
 221.] The process of Kind brings it to a being of its 
 own. Life being no more than the idea immediate, the 
 product of this process breaks up into two sides. On 
 the one hand, the living individual, which was at first 
 pre-supposed as immediate, is now seen to be mediated 
 and generated. On the other, however, the living indi- 
 viduality, which, on account of its first immediacy, stands 
 in a negative attitude towards universality, sinks in the 
 superior power of the latter. 
 
 The living being dies, because it is a contradiction. Im- 
 plicitly it is the universal or Kind, and yet immediately it 
 exists as an individual only. Death shows the Kind to be 
 the power that rules the immediate individual. For the 
 
362 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [221-224. 
 
 animal the process of Kind is the highest point of its vitality. 
 But the animal never gets so far in its Kind as to have a 
 being of its own ; it succumbs to the power of Kind. In the 
 process of Kind the immediate living being mediates itself 
 with itself, and thus rises above its immediacy, only however 
 to sink back into it again. Life thus runs away, in the 
 first instance, only into the false infinity of the progress ad 
 infinitum. The real result, however, of the process of life, 
 in the point of its notion, is to merge and overcome that 
 immediacy with which the idea, in the shape of life, is still 
 beset. 
 
 222.] In this manner however the idea of life has 
 thrown off not some one particular and immediate 
 'This,' but this first immediacy as a whole. It thus 
 comes to itself, to its truth : it enters upon existence as a 
 free Kind self-subsistent. The death of merely immediate 
 and individual vitality is the ' procession ' of spirit. 
 
 {b) Cognition in general. 
 
 223.] The idea exists free for itself, in so far as it has 
 universality for the medium of its existence, — as objec- 
 tivity itself has notional being, — as the idea is its own 
 object. Its subjectivity, thus universalised, is pure self- 
 contained distinguishing of the idea, — intuition which 
 keeps itself in this identical universality. But, as 
 specific distinguishing, it is the further judgment of 
 repelling itself as a totality from itself, and thus, in the 
 first place, pre-supposing itself as an external universe. 
 There are two judgments, which though implicitly iden- 
 tical are not yet explicitly put as identical. 
 
 224.] The relation of these two ideas, which implicitly 
 and as life are identical, is thus one of correlation : and 
 it is that correlativity which constitutes the characteristic 
 of finitude in this sphere. It is the relationship of re- 
 flection, seeing that the distinguishing of the idea in its 
 
224-225.] KNOWLEDGE AND WILL. 363 
 
 own self is only the first judgment — presupposing the 
 other and not yet supposing itself to constitute it. And 
 thus for the subjective idea the objective is the immediate 
 world found ready to hand, or the idea as life is in the 
 phenomenon of individual existence. At the same time, 
 in so far as this judgment is pure distinguishing within 
 its own limits (§ 223), the idea realises in one both itself 
 and its other. Consequently it is the certitude of the 
 virtual identity between itself and the objective world. — 
 Reason comes to the world with an absolute faith in its 
 abilit;, to make the identity actual, and to raise its certi- 
 tude to truth ; and with the instinct of realising explicitly 
 the nullity of that contrast which it sees to be implicitly 
 null. 
 
 225.] This process is in general terms Cognition. 
 In Cognition in a single act the contrast is virtually 
 superseded, as rega~ds both the one-sidedness of sub- 
 jectivity and the one-sidedness of objectivity. At first, 
 however, the supersession of the contrast is but implicit. 
 The process as such is in consequence immediately in- 
 fected with the finitude of this sphere, and splits into the 
 twofold movement of the instinct of reason, presented as 
 two different movements. On the one hand it supersedes 
 the one-sidedness of the Idea's subjectivity by receiving 
 the existing world into itself, into subjective conception 
 and thought ; and with this objectivity, which is thus 
 taken to be real and true, for its content it fills up the 
 abstract certitude of itself. On the other hand, it super- 
 sedes the one-sidedness of the objective world, which is 
 now, on the contrary, estimated as only a mere sem- 
 blance, a collection of contingencies and shapes at 
 bottom visionary. It modifies and informs that world 
 by the inward nature of the subjective, which is here 
 taken to be the genuine objective. The former is the 
 instinct of science after Truth, Cognition properly so 
 
364 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [225-227. 
 
 called : — the Theoretical action of the idea. The latter 
 is the instinct of the Good to fulfil the same — the 
 Practical activity of the idea or Volition. 
 
 (a) Cognition proper. 
 
 226.] The universal finitude of Cognition, vv^hich lies 
 in the one judgment, the pre-supposition of the contrast 
 (§ 224), — a pre-supposition in contradiction of which its 
 own act lodges protest, specialises itself more precisely 
 on the face of its own idea. The result of that speciali- 
 sation is, that its two elements receive the aspect of 
 being diverse from each other, and, as they are at least 
 complete, they take up the relation of ' reflection/ not 
 of 'notion,' to one another. The assimilation of the 
 matter, therefore, as a datum, presents itself in the light 
 of a reception of it into categories which at the same time 
 remain external to it, and which meet each other in the 
 same style of diversity. Reason is active here, but it is 
 reason in the shape of understanding. The truth 
 which such Cognition can reach will therefore be only 
 finite : the infinite truth (of the notion) is isolated and 
 made transcendent, an inaccessible goal in a world of 
 its own. Still in its external action cognition stands 
 under the guidance of the notion, and notional principles 
 form the secret clue to its movement. 
 
 The finitude of Cognition lies in the pre-supposition of a 
 world already in existence, and in the consequent view of the 
 knowing subject as a tabula rasa. The conception is one 
 attributed to Aristotle ; but no man is further than Aristotle 
 from such an outside theory of Cognition. Such a style of 
 Cognition does not recognise in itself the activity of thd 
 notion— an activity which it is implicitly, but not consciously. 
 In its own estimation its procedure is passive. Really that 
 procedure is active. 
 
 227.] Finite Cognition, when it pre-supposes what is 
 
227.] SCIENTIFIC METHODS. 365 
 
 distinguished from it to be something already existing 
 and confronting it, — to be the various facts of external 
 nature or of consciousness — has, in the first place, 
 (i) Formal identity or the abstraction of universality 
 for the form of its action. Its activity therefore consists 
 in analysing the given concrete object, isolating its 
 differences, and giving them the form of abstract univer- 
 sality. Or it leaves the concrete thing as a ground, and 
 by setting aside the unessential-looking particulars, 
 brings into relief a concrete universal, the Genus, or 
 Force and Law. This is the Analyticsil Method. 
 
 People generally speak of the analytical and synthetical 
 methods, as if it depended solely on our choice which we 
 pursued. This is far from the case. It depends on the form 
 of the objects of our investigation, which of the two methods, 
 that are derivable from the notion of finite cognition, ought 
 to be applied. In the first place, cognition is analj^ical. 
 Analytical cognition deals with an. object which is presented 
 in detachment, and the aim of its action is to trace back to a 
 universal the individual object before it. Thought in such 
 circumstances means no more than an act of abstraction or 
 of formal identity. That is the sense in which thought is 
 understood by Locke and all empiricists. Cognition, it is 
 often said, can never do more than separate the given 
 concrete objects into their abstract elements, and then con- 
 sider these elements in their isolation. It is, however, at 
 once apparent that this turns things upside down, and that 
 cognition, if its purpose be to take things as they are, thereby 
 falls into contradiction with itself Thus the chemist e.g. 
 places a piece of flesh in his retort, tortures it in many ways, 
 and then informs us that it consists of nitrogen, carbon, 
 hydrogen, &c. True: but these abstract matters have 
 ceased to be flesh. The same defect occurs in the reason- 
 ing of an empirical psychologist when he analyses an 
 action into the various aspects which it presents, and then 
 sticks to these aspects in their separation. The object which 
 is subjected to analysis is treated as. a sort of onion from 
 which one coat is peeled off after another.. 
 
366 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [228-229. 
 
 228.] This universality is (2) a'so a specific univer- 
 sality. In this case the line of activity follows the three 
 'momen's' of the notion, which (as it has not its infinity 
 in finite cognition) is the specific or definite notion of 
 understanding. The reception of the object into the 
 forms of this notion is the Synthetic Method. 
 
 The movement of the Synthetic method is the reverse of 
 the Analytical method. The latter starts from the indi- 
 vidual, and proceeds to the universal ; in the former the 
 starting-point is given by the universal (as a definition), 
 from which we proceed by particularising (in division) to 
 the individual (the theorem). The Synthetic method thus 
 presents itself as the developmen the ' moments ' of the 
 notion on the object. 
 
 229.] (n) When the object has been i:i the first in- 
 stance brought by cognition into the form of the specific 
 notion in general, so that in this way its genus and its 
 universal character or speciality are explicitly stated, we 
 nave the Definition. The materials and the proof of 
 Definition are procured by means of the Analytical 
 method (§ 227). The specific character however is 
 expected to be a ' mark ' only : that is to say it is to be 
 in behoof only of the purely subjective cognition which 
 is external to the object. 
 
 Definition involves the three organic elements of the 
 notion : the universal or proximate genus (genus proximum), 
 the particular or specific character of the genus [qualitas 
 specified), and the individual, or object defined. — The first 
 question that definition suggests, is where it comes from. 
 The general answer to this question is to sajr, that definitions 
 originate by way of analysis. This will explain how it 
 happens that people quarrel about the correctness of pro- 
 posed definitions ; for here everything depends on what 
 perceptions we started from, and what points of view we 
 had before our eyes in so doing. The richer the object to 
 
229-230.] SCIENTIFIC METHODS. 367 
 
 be defined is, that is, the more numerous are the aspects 
 which it offers to our notice, the more various are the defini- 
 tions we may frame of it. Thus there are quite a host of 
 definitions of life, of the state, &c. Geometry, on the con- 
 trary, dealing with a theme so abstract as space, has an easy 
 task in giving definitions. Again, in respect of the matter or 
 contents of the objects defined, there is no constraining 
 necessity present. We are expected to admit that space 
 exists, that there are plants, animals, &c., nor is it the busi- 
 ness of geometry, botany, &c. to demonstrate that the objects 
 in question necessarily are. This very circumstance makes 
 the synthetical method of cognition as little suitable for 
 philosophy as the analytical : for philosophy has above all 
 things to leave no doubt of the necessity of its objects. And 
 yet several attempts have been made to introduce the syn- 
 thetical method into philosophy. Thus Spinoza, in par- 
 ticular, begins with definitions. He says, for instance, that 
 substance is the causa sni. His definitions are unquestionably 
 a storehouse of the most speculative truth, but it takes the 
 shape of dogmatic assertions. The same thing is also true 
 of Schelling. 
 
 230.] (;3) The statement of the second element of the 
 notion, i.e. of the specific character of the universal as 
 particularising, is given by Division in accordance with 
 some external consideration. 
 
 Division we are told ought to be complete. That requires 
 a principle or ground of division so constituted, that the 
 division based upon it embraces the whole extent of the 
 region designated by the definition in general. But, in 
 division, there is the further requirement that the principle 
 of it must be borrowed from the nature of the object in 
 question. If this condition be satisfied, the division is 
 natural and not merely artificial, that is to say, arbitrary. 
 Thus, in zoology, the ground of division adopted in the 
 classification of the mammalia is mainly afforded by their 
 teeth and claws. That is so far sensible, as the mammals 
 themselves distinguish themselves from one another by these 
 parts of their bodies ; back to which therefore the general 
 
368 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [230-231. 
 
 type of their various classes is to be traced. In every case 
 the genuine division must be controlled by the notion. To 
 that extent a division, in the first instance, has three 
 members : but as particularity exhibits itself as double, the 
 division may go to the extent even of four members. In 
 the sphere of mind trichotomy is predominant, a circum- 
 stance which Kant has the credit of biinging into notice. 
 
 231.] (y) In the concrete individuality, where the mere 
 unanalysed quality of the definition is regarded as a cor- 
 relation of elements, the object is a synthetical nexus of 
 distinct characteristics. It is a Theorem. Being different, 
 these characteristics possess but a mediated identity. 
 To supply the materials, which form the middle terms, 
 is the office of Construction : and the process of media- 
 tion itself, from which cognition derives the necessity of 
 that nexus, is the Demonstration. 
 
 As the difference between the analytical and synthetical 
 methods is commonly stated, it seems entirely optional 
 which of the two we employ. If we assume, to start 
 with, the concrete thing which the synthetic method 
 presents as a result, we can analyse from it as conse- 
 quences the abstract propositions which formed the pre- 
 siippositions and the material for the proof. Thus, alge- 
 braical definitions of curved lines are theorems in the 
 method of geometry. Similarly even the Pythagorean 
 theorem, if made the definition of a right-angled 
 triangle, might yield to analysis those propositions 
 which geometry had already demonstrated on its be- 
 hoof. The optionalness of either method is due to 
 both alike starting from an external pre-supposition. So 
 far as the nature of the notion is concerned, analysis is 
 prior; since it has to raise the given material with it§ 
 empirical concreteness into the form of general abstrac- 
 tions, which may then be set in the front of the synthe- 
 tical method as definitions. 
 
231.] SCIENTIFIC METHODS. 369 
 
 That these methods, however indispensable and bril- 
 liantly successful in their own province, are unservice- 
 able for philosophical cognition, is self-evident. They 
 have pre-suppositions ; and their style of cognition is 
 that of understanding, proceeding under the canon of 
 formal identity. In Spinoza, who was especially ad- 
 dicted to the use of the geometrical method, we are at 
 once struck by its characteristic formalism. Yet his 
 ideas were speculative in spirit ; whereas the system of 
 Wolf, who carried the method out to the height of 
 pedantry, was even in subject-matter a metaphysic of the 
 understanding. The abuses which these methods with 
 their formalism once led to in philosophy and science 
 have in modern times been followed by the abuses of 
 what is called ' Construction.' Kant brought into vogue 
 the phrase that mathematics ' construes ' its notions. 
 All that was meant by the phrase was that mathematics 
 has not to do with notions, but with abstract qualities of 
 sense-perceptions. The name 'Construction (constru- 
 ing) of notions ' has since been given to a sketch or 
 statement of sensible attributes which were picked up 
 from perception, quite guiltless of any influence of the 
 notion, and to the additional formalism of classifying 
 scientific and philosophical objects in a tabular form on 
 some pre-supposed rubric, but in other respects at the 
 fancy and discretion of the observer. In the back- 
 ground of all this, certainly, there is a dim conscious- 
 ness of the Idea, of the unity of the notion and objec- 
 tivity, — a consciousness, too, that the idea is concrete. 
 But that play of what is styled 'construing' is far from 
 presenting this unity adequately — a unity which is none 
 other than the notion properly so called : and the sen- 
 suous concreteness of perception. is as little the concrete- 
 ness of reason and the idea. 
 
 Another point calls for notice. Geometry works with 
 
 VOL. II. B b 
 
370 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [231-232. 
 
 the sensuous but abstract perception of space ; and in 
 space it experiences no difficulty in isolating and defin- 
 ing certain simple analytic modes. To geometry alone 
 therefore belongs in its perfection the synthetical method 
 of finite cognition. In its course, however (and this is 
 the remarkable point), it finally stumbles upon what are 
 tei ned irrational and incommensurable quantities ; and 
 in their case any attempt at further specification drives 
 it beyond the principle of the understanding. This is 
 only one of many instances in terminology, where the 
 title rational is perversely applied to the province of 
 understanding, while we stigmatise as irrational that 
 which shows a beginning and a trace of rationality. 
 Other sciences, removed as they are from the simplicity 
 of space or number, often and necessarily reach a point 
 where understanding permits no further advance : but 
 they get over the difficulty without trouble. They make 
 a break in the strict sequence of their procedure, and 
 assume whatever they require, though it be the reverse 
 of what preceded, from some external quarter, — opinion, 
 perception^ conception or any other source. Its inob- 
 servancy as to the nature of its methods and their rela- 
 tivity to the subject-matter prevents this finite cognition 
 from seeing that, when it proceeds by definitions and 
 divisions, &c., it is really led on by the necessity of the 
 laws of the notion. For the same reason it cannot see 
 when it has reached its limit ; nor, if it have trans- 
 gressed that limit, does it perceive that it is in a sphere 
 where the categories of understanding, which it still 
 continues rudely to apply, have lost all authority. 
 
 232.] The necessity, which finite cognition produces 
 in the Demonstration, is, in the first place, an external 
 necessity, intended for the subjective intelligence alone. 
 But in necessity as such, cognition itself has left behind 
 its presupposition and starting-point, which consisted in 
 
333-334.] WILL. 371 
 
 accepting its content as given or found. Necessity qua 
 necessity is implicitly the self-relating notion. The sub- 
 jective idea has thus implicitly reached an original and 
 objective determinateness, — a something not-given, and 
 for that reason immanent in the subject. It has passed 
 over into the idea of Will. 
 
 The necessity which cognition reaches by means of the 
 demonstration is the reverse of what formed its starting- 
 point. In its starting-point cognition had a given and a con- 
 tingent content ; but now, at the close of its movement, it 
 knows its content to be necessary. This necessity is reached 
 by means of subjective agency. Similarly, subjectivity at 
 starting was quite abstract, a bare tabula rasa. It now shows 
 itself as a modifying and determining principle. In this way 
 we pass from the idea of cognition to that of will. The 
 passage, as will be apparent on a closer examination, means 
 that the universal, to be truly apprehended, must be appre- 
 hended as subjectivity, as a notion self-moving, active, and 
 form-imposing. 
 
 08) Volition. 
 
 233.] The subjective idea as original and objective 
 determinateness, and as a simple uniform content, is 
 the Good. Its impulse towards self-realisation is in its 
 behaviour the reverse of the idea of truth, and rather 
 directed towards moulding the world it finds before it 
 into a shape conformable to its purposed End. — This 
 Volition has, on the one hand, the certitude of the 
 nothingness of the pre-supposed object; but, on the 
 other, as finite, it at the same time pre-supposes the 
 purposed End of the Good to be a mere subjective idea, 
 and the object to be independent. 
 
 234.] This action of the Will is finite : and its finitude 
 
 lies in the contradiction that in the inconsister-t terms 
 
 applied to the objective world the End of the Good 
 
 is just as much not executed as executed, — the end 
 
 B b 2 
 
372 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [334. 
 
 in question put as unessential as much as essential, 
 — as actual and at the same, time as merely possible. 
 This contradiction presents itself to imagination as an 
 endless progress in the actualising of the Good ; which 
 is therefore set up and fixed as a mere ' ought,' or goal 
 of perfection. In point of form however this contra- 
 diction vanishes when the action supersedes the sub- 
 jectivity of the purpose, and along with it the objectivity, 
 with the contrast which makes both finite ; abolish- 
 ing subjectivity as a whole and not merely the one- 
 sidedness of this form of it, (For another new sub- 
 jectivity of the kind, that is, a new generation of the 
 contrast, is not distinct from that which is supposed to be 
 past and gone.) This return into itself is at the same 
 time the content's own 'recollection* that it is the 
 Good and the implicit identity of the two sides, — it is 
 a ' recollection * of the pre-supposition of the theoretical 
 attitude of mind (§ 224) that the objective world is its 
 own truth and substantiality. 
 
 While Intelligence merely proposes to take the world as 
 it is, Will takes steps to make the world what it ought to be. 
 Will looks upon the immediate and given present not as 
 solid being, but as mere semblance without reality. It is 
 here that we meet those contradictions which are so be- 
 wildering from the standpoint of abstract morality. This 
 position in its ' practical ' bearings is the one taken by the 
 philosophy of Kant, and even by that of Fichte. The Good, 
 say these writers, has to be realised : we have to work in 
 order to produce it : and Will is only the Good actualising 
 itself. If the world then were as it ought to be, the action of 
 Will would be at an end. The Will itself therefore requires 
 that its End should not be realised. In these words, a 
 correct expression is given to the finitude of Will. But 
 finitude was not meant to be the ultimate point : and it is 
 the process of Will itself which abolishes finitude and the 
 contradiction it involves. The reconciliation is achieved, 
 
234-236.] WILL. 373 
 
 when Will in its result returns to the pre-supposition made 
 by cognition. In other words, it consists in the unity of the 
 theoretical and practical idea. Will knows the end to be its 
 own, and Intelligence apprehends the world as the notion 
 actual. This is the right attitude of rational cognition. 
 Nullity and transitoriness constitute only the superficial 
 features and not the real essence of the world. That 
 essence is the notion in posse and in esse: and thus the 
 world is itself the idea. All unsatisfied endeavour ceases, 
 when we recognise that the final purpose of the world is 
 accomplished no less than ever accomplishing itself. Gene- 
 rally speaking, this is the man's way of looking ; while the 
 young imagine that the world is utterly sunk in wickedness, 
 and that the first thing needful is a thorough transformation. 
 The rehgious mind, on the contrary, views the world as 
 ruled by Divine Providence, and therefore correspondent 
 with what it ought to be. But this harmony between the 
 ' is ' and the ' ought to be ' is not torpid and rigidly stationary. 
 Good, the final end of the world, has being, only while it 
 constantly produces itself. And the world of spirit and the 
 world of nature continue to have this distinction, that the 
 latter moves only in a recurring cycle, while the former 
 certainly also makes progress. 
 
 235.] Thus the truth of the Good is laid down as the 
 unity of the theoretical and practical idea in the doc- 
 trine that the Good is radically and really achieved, 
 that the objective world is in itself and for itself the 
 Idea, just as it at the same time eternally lays itself 
 down as End, and by action brings about its actuality. 
 This life which has returned to itself from the bias and 
 finitude of cognition, and which by the activity of the 
 notion has become identical with it, is the Speculative 
 or Absolute Idea. 
 
 {c) The Absolute Idea. 
 236.] The Idea, as unity of the Subjective and Objec- 
 tive Idea, is the notion of the Idea,— a notion whose 
 object {Gegenstand) is the Idea as such, and for which 
 
374 ^-^^ DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [236-237. 
 
 the objective {Objekt) is Idea, — an Object which embraces 
 all characteristics in its unity. This unity is consequently 
 the absolute and all truth, the Idea which thinks itself, 
 — and here at least as a thinking or Logical Idea. 
 
 The Absolute Idea is, in the first place, the unity of the 
 theoretical and practical idea, and thus at the same time the 
 unity of the idea of life with the idea of cognition. In cog- 
 nition we had the idea in a biassed, one-sided shape. The 
 process of cognition has issued in the overthrow of this bias 
 and the restoration of that unity, which as unity, and in its 
 immediacy, is in the first instance the Idea of Life. The 
 defect of life lies in its being only the idea implicit or 
 natural: whereas cognition is in an equally one-sided way 
 the merely conscious idea, or the idea for itself. The unity 
 and truth of these two is the Absolute Idea, which is both in 
 itself and for itself Hitherto we have had the idea in 
 development through its various grades as our object, but 
 now the idea comes to be its own object. This is the vorian 
 voT](Tecoi which Aristotle long ago termed the supreme form 
 of the idea. 
 
 237.] Seeing that there is in it no transition, or pre- 
 supposition, and in general no specific character other 
 than what is fluid and transparent, the Absolute Idea is 
 for itself the pure form of the notion, which contem- 
 plates its content as its own self. It is its own content, 
 in so far as it ideally distinguishes itself from itself, and 
 the one of the two things distinguished is a self-identity 
 in which however is contained the totality of the form 
 as the system of terms describing its content. This 
 content is the system of Logic. All that is at this stage 
 left as form for the idea is the Method of this content, 
 — the specific consciousness of the value and currency of 
 the ' moments ' in its development. 
 
 To speak of the absolute idea may suggest the conception 
 that we are at length reaching the right thing and the sum 
 of the whole matter. It is certainly possible to indulge in a 
 
337-238.] THE ABSOLUTE IDEA. 375 
 
 vast amount of senseless declamation about the idea abso- 
 lute. But its true content is only the whole system of 
 which we have been hitherto studying the development. It 
 may also be said in this strain that the absolute idea is the 
 universal, but the universal not merely as an abstract form 
 to which the particular content is a stranger, but as the 
 absolute form, into which all the categories, the whole full- 
 ness of the content it has given being to, have retired. The 
 absolute idea may in this respect be compared to the old 
 man who utters the same creed as the child, but for whom it 
 is pregnant with the significance of a lifetime. Even if the 
 child understands the truths of religion, he cannot but 
 imagine them to be something outside of which Hes the 
 whole of life and the whole of the world. The same may be 
 said to be the case with human life as a whole and the 
 occurrences with which it is fraught. All work is directed 
 only to the aim or end ; and when it is attained, people are 
 surprised to find nothing else but just the very thing which 
 they had wished for. The interest lies in the whole move- 
 ment. When a man traces up the steps of his life, the end 
 may appear to him very restricted : but in it the whole 
 decursus vitae is comprehended. So, too, the content of the 
 absolute idea is the whole breadth of ground which has 
 passed under our view up to this point. Last of all comes 
 the discovery that the whole evolution is what constitutes 
 the content and the interest. It is indeed the prerogative of 
 the philosopher to see that everything, which, taken apart, is 
 narrow and restricted, receives its value by its connexion 
 with the whole, and by forming an organic element of the 
 idea. Thus it is that we have had the content already, and 
 what we have now is the knowledge that the content is the 
 living development of the idea. This simple retrospect is 
 contained in the form of the idea. Each of the stages 
 hitherto reviewed is an image of the absolute, but at first in 
 a limited mode, and thus it is forced onwards to the whole, 
 the evolution of which is what we termed Method. 
 
 238.] The several steps or stages of the Speculative 
 Method are, first of all, (a) the Beginning, which is 
 
376 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [238. 
 
 Being or Immediacy : self-subsistent, for the simple 
 reason that it is the beginning. But looked at from 
 the speculative idea, Being is its self-specialising act, 
 which as the absolute negativity or movement of the 
 notion makes a judgment and puts itself as its own 
 negative. Being, which to the beginning as beginning 
 seems mere abstract affirmation, is thus rather negation, 
 dependency, derivation, and pre-supposition. But it is 
 the notion, of which Being is the negation : and the 
 notion is completely self-identical in its otherness, and is 
 the certainty of itself. Being therefore is the notion 
 implicit, before it has been explicitly put as a notion. 
 This Being therefore, as the still unspecified notion, — a 
 notion that is only implicitly or 'immediately' specified 
 — is equally describable as the Universal. 
 
 When it means immediate being, the beginning is 
 taken from sensation and perception— the initial stage 
 in the analytical method of finite cognition. When it 
 means universality, it is the beginning of the synthetic 
 method. But since the Logical Idea is as much a 
 universal as it is in being — since it is pre-supposed by 
 the notion as much as it itself immediately is, its 
 beginning is a synthetical as well as an analytical 
 beginning. 
 
 Philosophical method is analytical as well as synthetical, 
 not indeed in the sense of a bare juxtaposition or mere 
 alternating employment of these two methods of finite 
 cognition, but rather in sueh a way that it holds them 
 merged in itself. In every one of its movements therefore 
 it displays an attitude at once analytical and synthetical. 
 Philosophical thought proceeds analytically, in so far as it 
 only accepts its object, the Idea, and while allowing it its own 
 way, is only, as it were, an on-looker at its movement and 
 development. To this extent philosophising is wholly 
 passive. Philosophic thought however is equally synthetic, 
 and evinces itself to be the action of the notion itself. To that 
 
238-341.] THE ABSOLUTE IDEA. 377 
 
 end, however, there is required an eflbrt to keep back the 
 incessant impertinence of our own fancies and private 
 opinions. 
 
 239.] [b] The Advance renders explicit the judgment 
 implicit in the Idea. The immediate universal, as the 
 notion implicit, is the dialectical force which on its own 
 part deposes its immediacy and universality to the 
 level of a mere stage or ' moment.' Thus is put the 
 negative of the beginning, its specific character : it 
 supposes a correlative, a relation of different terms, — 
 the stage of Reflection. 
 
 Seeing that the immanent dialectic only states ex- 
 plicitly what was involved in the immediate notion, this 
 advance is Analytical ; but seeing that in this notion this 
 distinction was not yet stated,^t is equally Synthetical. 
 
 In the advance of the idea, the beginning exhibits itself as 
 what it is implicitly. It is seen to be mediated and deriva- 
 tive, and neither to have proper being nor proper imme- 
 diacy. It is only for the consciousness which is itself 
 immediate, that Nature forms the commencement or im- 
 mediacy, and that Spirit appears as what is mediated by 
 Nature. The truth is that Nature is the creation of Spirit, 
 and it is Spirit itself which gives itself a pre-supposition in 
 Nature. 
 
 240.] The abstract form of the advance is, in Being, 
 an other and transition into an other; in Essence 
 showing or reflection in the opposite ; in Notion, the 
 distinction of individual from universality, which con- 
 tinues itself as such into, and is as an identity with, 
 what is distinguished from it. 
 
 241.] In the second sphere the primarily implicit 
 notion has come as far as shining, and thus is already 
 the idea in germ. The development of this sphere 
 becomes a regress into the first, just as the de- 
 velopment of the first is a transition into the second. 
 
378 THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION. [241-243. 
 
 It is only by means of this double movement, that th( 
 difference first gets its due, when each of the two 
 members distinguished, observed on its own part, 
 completes itself to the totality, and in this way works 
 out its unity with the other. It is only by both merging 
 their one-sidedness on their own part, that their unity is 
 kept from becoming one-sided. 
 
 242.] The second sphere developes the relation of 
 the differents to what it primarily is, — to the contradic- 
 tion in its own nature. That contradiction which is 
 seen in the infinite progress is resolved [c) into the end 
 or terminus, where the differenced is explicitly stated 
 as what it is in notion. The end is the negative of the 
 first, and as the identity with that, is the negativity of 
 itself. It is consequently the unity in which both of 
 these Firsts, the immediate and the real First, are made 
 constituent stages in thought, merged, and at the same 
 time preserved in the unity. The notion, which from 
 its implicitness thus comes by means of its differentiation 
 and the merging of that differentiation to close with 
 itself, is the realised notion,— the notion which contains 
 the relativity or dependence of its special features in its 
 own independence. It is the idea which, as absolutely 
 first (in the method), regards this terminus as tnerely the 
 disappearance of the show or semblance, which made 
 the beginning appear immediate, and made itself seem 
 a result. It is the knowledge that the idea is the one 
 systematic whole. 
 
 243.] It thus appears that the method is not an ex- 
 traneous form, but the soul and notion of the content, 
 from which it is only distinguished, so far as the 
 dynamic elements of the notion even on their own part 
 come in their own specific character to appear as the 
 totality of the notion. This specific character, or the 
 content, leads itself with the form back to the idea ; 
 
243-244.] THE ABSOLUTE IDEA. 379 
 
 and thus the idea is presented as a systematic totality 
 which is only one idea, of which the several elements 
 are each implicitly the idea, whilst they equally by the 
 dialectic of the notion produce the simple independence 
 of the idea. The science in this manner concludes by 
 apprehending the notion of itself, as of the pure idea 
 for which the idea is. 
 
 244.] The Idea which is independent or for itself, 
 when viewed on the point of this its unity with itself, is 
 Perception or Intuition, and the percipient Idea is 
 Nature. But as intuition the idea is, through an ex- 
 ternal 'reflection,' invested with the one-sided charac- 
 teristic of immediacy, or of negation. Enjoying how- 
 ever an absolute liberty, the Idea does not merely pass 
 over into life, or as finite cognition allow life to show 
 in it : in its own absolute truth it resolves to let the 
 'moment' of its particularity, or of the first charac- 
 terisation and other-being, the immediate idea, as its 
 reflected image, go forth freely as Nature. 
 
 We have now returned to the notion of the Idea with 
 which we began. This return to the beginning is also an 
 advance. We began with Being, abstract Being : where we 
 now are we also have the Idea as Being : but this Idea which 
 has Being is Nature. 
 
NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Page 5, § 2. After-thought = 9'?a(^bcnfen, i. e. thought which 
 retraces and reproduces an original, but submerged, thought (cf. 
 Hegel's Werke, vi. p. xv) : to be distinguished from Reflexion (cf. 
 Werke, i. 174). 
 
 P. 7, § 3. On the blending of universal (thought) and indi- 
 vidual (sensation) in what is called perception (SfBa^rnel^men) see 
 EncycL §§ 420, 421. 
 
 P. 8, § 3. Cf. Fichte, Werke, ii. 454 : ' Hence for the com- 
 mon sort of hearers and readers the uncommon intelligibility of 
 certain sermons and lectures and writings, not one word of which 
 is intelligible to the man who thinks for himself,— because there 
 is really no intelligence in them. The old woman who frequents 
 the church— for whom by the way I cherish all possible respect — 
 finds a sermon very intelligible and very edifying which contains 
 lots of texts and verses of hymns she knows by rote and can 
 repeat. In the same way readers, who fancy themselves far 
 superior to her, find a work very instructive and clear which 
 tells them what they already know, and proofs very stringent 
 which demonstrate what they already beheve. The pleasure the 
 reader takes in the writer is a concealed pleasure in himself. 
 What a great man ! (he says to himselQ ; it is as if I heard or 
 read myself.' 
 
 P. 10, § 6. Cf. Hegel, Werke, viii. 17 : 'In this conviction 
 (that what is reasonable is actual, and what is actual is reason- 
 able) stands every plain man, as well as the philosopher ; and 
 from it philosophy starts in the study both of the spiritual and 
 
384 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 of the natural universe. . . . The great thing however is, in the 
 show of the temporal and the transient to recognise the sub- 
 stance which is immanent and the eternal which is present. 
 For the work of reason (which is synonymous with the Idea), 
 when in its actuality it simultaneously enters external existence, 
 emerges with an infinite wealth of forms, phenomena and 
 phases, and envelopes its kernel with the motley rind with 
 which consciousness is earliest at home,— a rind which the 
 notion must penetrate before it can find the inward pulse and 
 feel it still beating even in the outward phases. But the infinite 
 variety of circumstance which is formed in this externality by 
 the light of the essence shining in it,— all this infinite material, 
 with its regulations, — is not the object of philosophy. ... To 
 comprehend what is, is the task of philosophy : for what is is 
 reason. As regards the individual, each, whatever happens, 
 is a son of his time. So too philosophy is its time apprehended 
 in thoughts. It is just as foolish to fancy that a philosophy can 
 overleap its present world as that an individual can overleap 
 his time. If his theory really goes beyond actualities, if it 
 constructs an ideal, a world as it ought to be, then such exist- 
 ence as it has is only in his intentions — a yielding element in 
 which anything you please may be fancy-formed.' Cf. Schelling, 
 Werke, iv. 390: 'There are very many things, actions, &c. of 
 which we may judge, after vulgar semblance, that they are 
 unreasonable. All the same we presuppose and assume that 
 everything which is or which happens is reasonable, and that 
 reason is, in one word, the prime matter and the real of all 
 being.' 
 
 P. 11, § 6. Actuality (®irntc^feit) in Werke, iv. 178 seqq. 
 
 P. 12, § 7. Cf. Fichte, Werke, ii. 333 : ' Man has nothing at 
 all but experience; and everything he comes to he comes to 
 only through experience, through life itself. All his thinking, 
 be it loose or scientific, common or transcendental, starts from 
 experience and has experience ultimately in view. Nothing has 
 unconditional value and significance but life ; all other thinking, 
 conception, knowledge has value only in so far as in some way 
 or other it refers to the fact of life, starts from it, and has in 
 view a subsequent return to it.' 
 
 P. 13, § 7 (note). Thomas Thomson (1773- 1852), Professor 
 of Chemistry at Glasgow, distinguished in the early history of 
 chemistry and allied sciences. The Annals of Philosophy 
 
CHAPTER I. §§ 6-13. 385 
 
 appeared from 1813 to 1826. — The art of ■preserving the hair 
 was published (anonymous) at London in 1825. 
 
 P. 14, § 7 (note). The speech from the throne was read on 
 Feb. 3rd, 1825. 
 
 The shipowners' dinner was on Feb. 12. The Times of 
 Feb. 14 gives as Canning's the words * the just and wise maxims 
 of sound not spurious philosophy.' 
 
 P. 17, § 10. ' Scholasticus ' is the guileless 'freshman,' hero 
 of certain Facetiae (attributed to the Pythagorean philosopher 
 Hierocles) which used occasionally to form part of the early 
 Greek reading of schoolboys. 
 
 K. L. Reinhold (1754-1823) presents in his intellectual history 
 a picture of the development of ideas in his age. At the be- 
 ginning his Attempt of a new theory of the human representa- 
 tive faculty (1789) is typical of the tendency to give a subjective 
 psychological interpretation of Kant's theory of knowledge. 
 But the period of Reinhold's teaching here referred to is that of 
 the Contributions to an easier survey of the condition of philo- 
 sophy at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Seitrdge, 1801) : 
 the tendency which Hegel, who reviewed him in the Critical 
 Journal of Philosophy ( Werke, i. 267 seqq.), calls ' philosophising 
 before philosophy.' — A similar spirit is operative in Krug's pro- 
 posal (in his Fundamental Philosophy, 1803) to st,art with what 
 he called ' philosophical problematics.' 
 
 P. 19, § II. Plato, Phaedo, p. 89, where Socrates protests 
 against the tendency to confound the defect of a particular piece 
 of reasoning with the incompetence of human reason altogether, 
 
 P. 22, § 13. The dictum that the historical succession of 
 philosophical systems is identical with their logical sequence 
 should not be taken too literally and mechanically. Its essential 
 point is simply the theorem that history is not a casual series of 
 unconnected events, — the deeds of particular persons, but is an 
 evolution under laws and uniformities :— it is this theorem ap- 
 plied to philosophies. But difficulties may easily arise in the 
 application of the general principle: e.g. it will be seen (by 
 comparison of § 86 and § 104) that though Pythagoras precedes 
 Parmenides, and number is a stepping-stone to pure thought, 
 still pure Being comes at an earlier stage than Quantity. 
 
 P. 23, § 13. There is a silent reference to what Reinhold 
 professed to make the subject of his teaching at Jena — ' philo- 
 sophy without surnames ' (c^iie ©einamcu),— /. e. not a * critical ' 
 
 VOL. II. C C 
 
386 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 philosophy ;— or to the * Philosophy which may not bear any 
 man's name' of Beck. As Hegel says, Werke, xvi. 138, 'The 
 solicitude and apprehension against being one-sided is only too 
 often part of the weakness which is capable only of many-sided 
 illogical superficiality.' 
 
 P. 27, § i6. By ' anthropology ' is meant not the anthropology 
 of modem writers, who use the name to denote mainly the his- 
 tory of human culture in its more rudimentary stages, and as 
 exhibited chiefly in material products, but the study of those 
 aspects of psychology which are most closely allied with physio- 
 logical conditions. 
 
 With the power of the intuition of genius to give almost all 
 that logical synthesis can produce, cf. Werke, I. 331 : ' In this 
 way a grand and pure intuition is able, in the purely architec- 
 tonic features of its picture, though the inter-connection of neces- 
 sity and the mastery of form does not come forward into visibility, 
 to give expression to the genuine ethical organism— like a 
 building which silently exhibits the spirit of its author in the 
 several features of its mass, without the image of that spirit being 
 set forth anywhere in one united shape. In such a delinea- 
 tion, made by help of notions, it is only a want of technical skill 
 which prevents reason from raising the principle it embraces 
 and pervades into the " ideal " form and becoming aware of it as 
 the Idea. If the intuition only remains true to itself and does 
 not let analytic intellect disconcert it, it will probably— just 
 because it cannot dispense with notions for its expression — 
 behave awkwardly in dealing with them, assume distorted shapes 
 in its passage through consciousness, and be (to the speculative 
 eye) both incoherent and contradictory : but the arrangement of 
 the parts and of the self-modifying characters betray the inward 
 spirit of reason, however invisible. And so far as this appear- 
 ance of that spirit is regarded as a product and a result, it will 
 as product completely harmonise with the Idea.' Probably 
 Goethe is before Hegel's mind. 
 
 P. 28, § 17. The triplicity in unity of thought— its forthgoing 
 ('procession,' cf. p. 362 seqq.) and its return, which is yet an 
 abiding in itself (5}ci;fid^;f€iu) was first explicitly schematised by 
 Proclus, the consummator of Neo-Platonism. In his Institutio 
 Theologica he lays it down that the essential character of all 
 spiritual reality (do-co/xaToi)) is to be itpihi kavro fnia-rpfiTTiKov, i. e. 
 to return upon itself, or to be a unity in and with difference, — 
 
CHAPTER I, § 12— CHAPTER H, ^ 20. 387 
 
 to be an original and spontaneous principle of movement (c. 1 5) : 
 or, as in C. 31 : nav to trpoibv an6 rivos kot ovainv €Tri(rrpt<f)fTai irpos 
 fKf'ivo a0' ov npofiaiv. Its movement, therefore, is circular 
 {KVKXiKqv €X" rqv (vipyeiav) (c. 33) : for everything must at the 
 same time remain altogether in the cause, and proceed from it, 
 and revert to it (c. 35). Such an essence is self-subsistent 
 a\)6vn6(TTaTov), — is at once agent {napayov) and patient {napayo- 
 fjL(vov). This ' mysticism ' (of a trinity which is also unity of 
 motion which is also rest), with its jrp6o8os, f'ina-Tpocfifj, and p-dvrj, 
 is taken up, in his own way, by Scotus Erigena {De Divisione 
 Naturae) as processio (or divisio), reditus, and adunatio. From 
 God ' proceed ' — by an eternal creation — the creatures, who 
 however are not outside the divine nature ; and to God all things 
 created eternally return. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 P. 31, § 19. Truth :— as early as Werke, i. 82, i.e. 1801, 
 Hegel had come — perhaps influenced by the example of Jacobi — 
 to the conclusion that ' Truth is a word which, in philosophical 
 discourse, deserves to be used only of the certainty of the Eternal 
 and non-empirical Actual.' (And so Spinoza, ii. 310.) 
 
 P. 32. * The young have been flattered ' — e. g. by Fichte, 
 Werke, i. 435 : ' Hence this science too promises itself few 
 proselytes amongst men already formed : if it can hope for any 
 at all, it hopes for them rather from the young world, whose 
 inborn force has not yet been ruined in the laxity of the age.' 
 
 P. 38, § 20. What Kant actually said {Kritik der reinen 
 Vemunft: Elementarlehre, § 16), was 'The I think must be 
 able to accompany all my conceptions ' (SBorjleKungcn). Here, as 
 often elsewhere, Hegel seems to quote from memory,— with 
 some shortcoming from absolute accuracy. 
 
 From this point Fichte's idealism takes its spring, e. g. 
 Werke, ii. 505 : * The ground of all certainty, — of all conscious- 
 ness of fact in life, and of all demonstrative knowledge in 
 science, is this : In and with the single thing we afifirm (fe^en) 
 (and whatever we aflirm is necessarily something single) we also 
 affirm the absolute totality as such. . . . Only in so far as we 
 have so affirmed anything, is it certain for us,— from the single 
 unit we have comprehended under it away to every single thing 
 in the infinity we shall comprehend under it,— from the one 
 c c 2 
 
388 NOT^S AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 individual who has comprehended it, to all individuals who will, 
 comprehend it. . . . Without this absolute "positing " of the abso- 
 lute totality in the individual, we cannot (to employ a phrase of 
 Jacobi's) come to bed and board.' 
 
 ' Obviously therefore you enunciate not the judgment of a 
 single observation, but you embrace and " posit " the sheer infini- 
 tude and totality of all possible observations :— an infinity which 
 is not at all compounded out of finites, but out of which, con- 
 versely, the finites themselves issue, and of which finite things 
 are the mere always-uncompleted analysis. This — how shall 
 I call it, procedure, positing, or whatever you prefer — this " mani- 
 festation " of the absolute totality, I call intellectual vision 
 (Sluf^auung). I regard it — ^just because I cannot in any way get 
 beyond intelligence — as immanent in intelligence, and name it 
 so far egoity (Sc^^eit), — not objectivity and not subjectivity, but 
 the absolute identity of the two : — an egoity, however, which it 
 was to be hoped would not be taken to mean individuality. 
 There lies in it, what you ' (he is addressing Reinhold, who here 
 follows Bardili) ' call a repetibility ad infinitum. For me, there- 
 fore, the essence of the finite is composed of an immediate vision 
 of the absolutely timeless infinite (with an absolute identity of 
 subjectivity and objectivity), and of a separation of the two latter, 
 and an analysis (continued ad infinitum) of the infinite. In that 
 analysis consists the temporal life : and the starting-point of 
 this temporal life is the separation into subject and object, which 
 throttgh. the intellectual vision (intuition) are still both held 
 together.' 
 
 P. 44, § 22, iAe mere fact of conviction. Cf. Rechtsphilosophie, 
 § 140 {Werke, viii. 191): 'Finally the mere conviction which 
 holds something to be right is given out as what decides the 
 morality of an action. The good we will to do not yet having 
 any content, the principle of conviction adds the information 
 that the subsumption of an action under the category of good is 
 purely a personal matter. If this be so, the very pretence of an 
 ethical objectivity is utterly lost. A doctrine like this is closely 
 allied with the self-styled philosophy which denies that the true 
 is cognoscible : because for the Will, truth — i. e. the rationality 
 of the Will — lies in the moral laws. Giving out, as such a 
 system does, that the cognition of the true is an empty vanity, 
 far transcending the range of science (which recognises only 
 appearance), it must, in the matter of conduct, also find its 
 
CHAPTER II, §§ 20-22. 389 
 
 principle in the apparent ; whereby moral distinctions are re- 
 duced to the peculiar theory of life held by the individual and 
 to his private conviction. At first no doubt the degradation 
 into which philosophy has thus sunk seems an affair of supreme 
 indifference, a mere incident in the futilities of the scholastic 
 world : but the view necessarily makes itself a home in ethics, 
 which is an essential part of philosophy ; and it is then in the 
 actual world that the world learns the true meaning of such 
 theories. 
 
 * As the view spreads that subjective conviction, and it c'one, 
 decides the morality of an action, it follows that the charge of 
 hypocrisy, once so frequent, is now rarely heard. You can only 
 qualify wickedness as hypocrisy on the assumption that certain 
 actions are inherently and actually misdeeds, vices, and crimes, 
 and that the defaulter necessarily is aware of them as such, 
 because he is aware of and recognises the principles and out- 
 ward acts of piety and honesty, even in the pretence to which 
 he misapplies them. In other words, it was generally assumed 
 as regards immorality that it is a duty to know the good, and 
 to be aware of 'ts distinction from the bad. In any case it 
 wrs an absolute injunction which torbade the commission of 
 vicious and criminal acts, and which insisted on such actions 
 being imputed to the agent, so far as he was a man, not a beast. 
 But if the good heart, the good intention, the subjective con- 
 viction, are set forth as the true sources of moral worth, then 
 there is no longer any hypocrisy, or ..nmorality at ull : for 
 ..hatever one does, he can always justify it by the reflection 
 on it of good aims and motives ; and by the influence of that 
 conviction it is good. There is no longer anything inherently 
 vicious or criminal : instead of the frank ana free, hardened 
 and unperturbed sinner, comes the person whose mind is com- 
 pletely justified by intention and conviction. My good intention 
 in my act, and my conviction of its goodness, make it good. 
 We speak of judging and estimating an act. But on this prin- 
 ciple it is only the aim and conviction of the agent — his faith — 
 by which he ought to be judged. And that not in the sense in 
 which Christ requires faith in objective truth, so that for one 
 who has a bad faith, i.e. a conviction bad in its content, the 
 judgment to be pronounced must be bad, i. e. conformable to this 
 bad content. But faith here means only fidehty to conviction. 
 Has the man (we ask) in acting kept true to his conviction .-' It 
 
39© NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 is formal subjective conviction on which alone the obligation of 
 duty is made to depend. 
 
 'A principle like this, where conviction is expressly made 
 something subjective, cannot but suggest the thought of pos- 
 sible error, with the further implied presupposition of an abso- 
 lutely-existing law. But the law is no agent : it is only the 
 actual human being who acts ; and in the aforesaid principle 
 the only question in estimating human actions is how far he has 
 received the law into his conviction.- If, therefore, it is not the 
 actions which are to be estimated and generally measured by 
 that law, it is impossible to see what the law is for, and what 
 end it can serve. Such a law is degraded to a mere outside 
 letter, in fact an empty word ; which is only made a law, /. e. 
 invested with obligatory force, by my conviction. 
 
 * Such a law may claim its authority from God or the State : 
 it may even have the authority of tens of centuries during which 
 it served as the bond that gave men, with all their deed and 
 destiny, subsistence and coherence. And these are authorities 
 in which are condensed the convictions of countless individuals. 
 And for me to set against that the authority of my single con- 
 viction—for as my subjective conviction its sole validity is 
 authority — that self-conceit, monstrous as it at first seems, is, 
 in virtue of the principle that subjective conviction is to be 
 the rule, pronounced to be no self-conceit at all. 
 
 ' Even if reason and conscience— which shallow science and 
 bad sophistry can never altogether expel — admit, with a noble 
 illogicality, that error is possible, still by describing crime and 
 wickedness as only an error we minimise the fault. For to 
 err is human : — Who has not been mistaken on one point or 
 another, whether he had fresh or pickled cabbage for dinner, 
 and about innumerable things more or less important ? But the 
 diflference of more or less importance disappears if everything 
 turns on the subjectivity of conviction and on persistency in it. 
 But the said noble illogicality which admits error to be possible, 
 when it comes round to say that a wrong conviction is only an 
 error, really only falls into a further illogicality— the illogicality 
 of dishonesty. One time conviction is made the basis of morality 
 and of man's supreme value, and is thus pronounced the supreme 
 and holy. Another time all we have to do with is an error : 
 my conviction is something trivial and casual, strictly speaking 
 something outside, that may turn out this way or that. And, 
 
CHAPTER II, §§ 22-23. 391 
 
 really, my being convinced is son^ething supremely trivial : if 
 I cannot know truth, it is indifferent how I think ; and all that 
 is left to my thinking is that empty good,— a mere abstraction 
 of generalisation. 
 
 ' It follows further that, on this principle of justification by 
 conviction, logic requires me, in dealing with the way others 
 act against my action, to admit that, so far as they in their 
 belief and conviction hold my actions to be crimes, they are 
 quite in the right. On such logic not merely do I gain nothing, 
 1 am even deposed from the post of liberty and honour into 
 a situation of slavery and dishonour. Justice — which in the 
 abstract is mine as well as theirs— I feel only as a foreign sub- 
 jective conviction, and in the execution of justice I fancy myself 
 to be only treated by an external force.' 
 
 P. 44, § 23. ©elbflbenfen- to think and not merely to read or 
 listen is the recurrent cry of Fichte [e.g. Werke, ii. 329). Ac- 
 cording to the editors of Werke, xv. 582, the reference here is 
 to Schleiermacher and to his Monologues. Really it is to the 
 Komantic principle in general, especially F. Schlegel. 
 
 P. 45, § 23. Cf. Fichte, Werke, ii. 404 : ' Philosophy (2Biffen- 
 f^aft0|e^rc), besides (for the reason above noted that it has no 
 auxiliary, no vehicle of the intuition at all, except the intuition 
 itself), elevates the human mind higher than any geometry can. 
 It gives the mind not only attentiveness, dexterity, stability, but 
 at the same time absolute independence, forcing it to be alone 
 with itself, and to live and manage by itself. Compared with 
 it, every other mental operation is infinitely easy ; and to one 
 who has been exercised in it nothing comes hard. Besides, 
 as it prosecutes all objects of human lore to the centre, it 
 accustoms the eye to hit the proper point at first glance in 
 everything presented to it, and to prosecute it undeviatingly. 
 For such a practical philosopher therefore there can be nothing 
 dark, complicated, and confused, if only he is acquainted with 
 the object of discussion. It comes always easiest to him to 
 construct everything afresh and ab initio, because he carries 
 within him plans for every scientific edifice. He finds his way 
 easily, therefore, in any complicated structure. Add to this 
 the security and confidence of glance which he has acquired in 
 philosophy,— the guide which conducts in all raisonnement, and 
 the imperturbability with which his eye meets every divergence 
 from the accustomed path and every paradox. It would be 
 
392 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 quite different with all human concerns, if men could only 
 resolve to believe their eyes. At present they inquire at 
 their neighbours and at antiquity what they really see, and by 
 this distrust in themselves errors are eternalised. Against this 
 distrust the possessor of philosophy is for ever protected. In a 
 word, by philosophy the mind of man comes to itself, and from 
 henceforth rests on itself without foreign aid, and is completely 
 master of itself, as the dancer of his feet, or the boxer of his 
 hands.' 
 
 P. 45, § 23. Aristotle, Metaph. I 2, 1 9 (cf. Eth. x. 7). See 
 also IVerke, xiv. 280 seqq. 
 
 P. 46, § 24. Schelling's expression, 'petrified intelligence.' 
 The reference is to some verses of Schelling in IVerke, iv. 546 
 (first published in Zeitschriftfiir speculative Physik, 1800). We 
 have no reason to stand in awe of the world, he says, which is 
 a tame and quiet beast — 
 
 ©tccft jwar ein OJiefengeifl barinncu, 
 
 %\i abcr »erfieinert mit alien ©innen; 
 
 3n tobten iinb (ebcnbigen S^ingcn 
 
 VcjOX jiac^ a3enjufitfet)n ntac^tig ringen. 
 In human shape he at length awakes from the iron sleep, from 
 the long dream : but as man he feels himself a stranger and 
 exile ; he would fain return to great Nature ; he fears what 
 surrounds him and imagines spectres, not knowing he might 
 say of Nature to himself — 
 
 3^ bin bet ®ott, ben fie im Sufen Iiegt, 
 
 JDcr @eifi, ber ftc^ in adetn behjtgt : 
 
 ffiom fnii)flen OJingen bunfler .ffrdfte 
 
 58i6 jum drguf bee tti^en fiebenefdfte, 
 
 ^etauf ju bed ©ebanfens Sugenbfvaft 
 Scburd^ 9latur serfungt fid^ irteber fc^afft, 
 3fi eine ^raft, ein 3Bec^fetfviet unb SBeben, 
 6in Xrieb unb S)rang no^ immct l^of^enn 8cben. 
 
 Cf. Oken, Naiurphilosophie, § 2913: *A natural body is a 
 thought of the primal act, turned rigid and crystallised,— a word 
 of God.' 
 
 Phrases of like import are not infrequent in Schelling's works 
 (about 1800-1), e.g.- IVerke, i. Abth, iii. 341 : * The dead and 
 
CHAPTER II, §§ 23-24. 393 
 
 unconscious products of nature are only unsuccessful attempts 
 to " reflect " itself ; so-called dead nature is in all cases an 
 immature intelligence' (unreife Sntelligeni), or iv. 77, 'Nature 
 itself is an intelligence, as it were, turned to rigidity (erflarrte)» 
 with all its sensations and perceptions ' ; and ii. 226 {Ideen 
 zu einer Philosophie der Natur, 1797), 'Hence nature is only 
 intelligence turned into the rigidity of being ; its qualities are 
 sensations extinguished to being ; bodies are its perceptions, so 
 to speak, killed.' 
 
 A close approach to the phrase quoted is found in the words 
 of another of the ' Romantic ' philosophers : * Nature is a petri- 
 fied mag^c-city ' (ccrjleinerte 3auberjiabt). (Novalis, Schriften, 
 ii. 149.) 
 
 P. 48, § 24. Cf. Fichte to Jacobi : (Jacobi's Briefwechsel, ii, 
 208) * My absolute Ego is obviously not the individual : that ex- 
 planation comes from injured snobs and peevish philosophers, 
 seeking to impute to me the disgraceful doctrine of practical 
 egoism. But the individual must be deduced from the absolute 
 ego. To that task my philosophy will proceed. in the "Natural 
 Law." A finite being— it may be deductively shown— can only 
 think itself as a sense-being in a sphere of sense-beings, — on one 
 part of which (that which has no power of origination) it has 
 causality, while with the other part (to which it attributes a sub- 
 jectivity like its own) it stands in reciprocal relations. In such 
 circumstances it is called an individual, and the conditions of 
 individuality are called rights. As surely as it affirms its indivi- 
 duality, so surely does it affirm such a sphere — the two concep- 
 tions indeed are convertible. So long as we look upon ourselves 
 as individuals — and we always so regard ourselves in life, though 
 not in philosophy and abstract imagination — we stand on what 
 I call the " practical " point of view in our reflections (while 
 to the standpoint of the absolute ego I give the name "specula- 
 tive "). From the former point of view there exists for us a world 
 independent of us,— a world we can only modify ; whilst the 
 pure ego (which even on this altitude does not altogether dis- 
 appear from us,) is put outside us and called God. How else 
 could we get the properties we ascribe to God and deny to our- 
 selves, did we not after all find them within us, and only refuse 
 them to ourselves in a certain respect, i.e. as individuals ? When 
 this " practical " point of view predominates in our reflections, 
 realism is supreme : when speculation itself deduces and re- 
 
394 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 cognises that standpoint, there results a complete reconciliation 
 between philosophy and common sense as premised in my 
 system. 
 
 * For what good, then, is the speculative standpoint and the 
 whole of philosophy therewith, if it be not for life? Had 
 humanity not tasted of this forbidden fruit, it might dispense 
 with all philosophy. But in humanity there is a wish implanted 
 to behold that region lying beyond the individual ; and to be- 
 hold it not merely in a reflected light but face to face. The first 
 who raised a question about God's existence broke through the 
 barriers, he shook humanity in its main foundation pillars, and 
 threw it out of joint into an intestine strife which is not yet 
 settled, and which can only be settled by advancing boldly to 
 that supreme point from which the speculative and the prac- 
 tical appear to be at one. We began to philosophise from pride 
 of heart, and thus lost our innocence : we beheld our naked- 
 ness, and ever since we philosophise from the need of our 
 redemption,' 
 
 P. 50. Physics and Philosophy of Nature: cf. Werke, vii. i, 
 p. 18 : 'The Philosophy of Nature takes up the material, pre- 
 pared for it by physics out of experience, at the point to which 
 physics has brought it, and again transforms it, without basing 
 it ultimately on the authority of experience. Physics therefore 
 must work into the hands of philosophy, so that the latter may 
 translate into a true comprehension (Q3f9riff) the abstract uni- 
 versal transmitted to it, showing how it issues from that com- 
 prehension as an intrinsically necessary whole. The philosophic 
 way of putting the facts is no mere whim once in a way, by 
 way of change, to walk on the head, after walking a long while 
 on the legs, or once in a way to see our every-day face be- 
 smeared with paint. No ; it is because the method of physics 
 does not satisfy the comprehension, that we have to go on 
 further.' 
 
 P. 51, § 24. The distinction of ordinary and speculative 
 Logic is partly like that made by Fichte (i. 68) between Logic 
 and ffiiffcnfc^afteleljre. ' The former,' says Fichte, * is conditioned 
 and determined by the latter.' Logic deals only with form ; 
 epistomology with import as well. 
 
 P. 54, § 24. The Mosaic legend of the Fall ; cf. similar inter- 
 pretations in Kant : Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen 
 Vemun/t, !*«» Stuck ; and Schelling, Werke^ i. (i. Abth.) 34. 
 
CHAPTER IT, § 24 — CHAPTER HI, § 3I. 395 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 p. 61, § 28. Fichte — to emphasise the experiential truth of 
 his system — says {Werke, ii. 331): 'There was a philosophy 
 which professed to be able to expand by mere inference the 
 range thus indicated for philosophy. According to it, thinking 
 was— not, as we have described it, the analysis of what was 
 given and the recombining of it in other forms, but at the same 
 time — a production and creation of something quite new. In 
 this system the philosopher found himself in the exclusive f>os- 
 session of certain pieces of knowledge which the vulgar under- 
 standing had to do without. In it the philosopher could reason 
 out for himself a God and an immortality and talk himself into 
 the conclusion that he was wise and good.' 
 
 Wolfs definition of philosophy is ' the Science of the possible 
 in so far as it can be ' ; and the possible = the non-contra- 
 dictory. 
 
 P. 64, § 29. The oriental sage corresponds (cf. Hegel, Werke, 
 xii. 229) to the writer known as Dionysius the Areopagite {^De 
 Mystica Theologia, and De Divints Nominibus). — The same 
 problem as to the relation of the Infinite (God) to the Finite 
 (world) is discussed in Jewish speculation (by Saadia, Mamuni, 
 &c.) as the question of the divine names, — a dogma founded on 
 the thirteen names (or attributes) applied to God in Exodus 
 xxxiv. 6. (Cf. D. Kaufmann, Geschichte der Attributenlehre.) 
 The same spirit has led to the list of ninety-nine 'excellent 
 names ' of Allah in Islam, a list which tradition derives from 
 Mohammed. 
 
 P. 65, § 31. Cf. Werke, ii. 47 seqq.\ 'The nature of the 
 judgment or proposition— involving as it does a distinction of 
 subject and predicate— is destroyed by the " speculative " pro- 
 position. This conflict of the prepositional form with the unity 
 of comprehension which destroys it is like the antagonism in 
 rhythm between metre and accent. The rhythm results from 
 the floating " mean " and unification of the two. Hence even in 
 the " philosophical " proposition the identity of subject and pre- 
 dicate is not meant to annihilate their difference (expressed 
 by the prepositional fonn) : their unity is meant to issue as a 
 harmony. The propositional form lets appear the definite shade 
 or accent pointing to a distinction in its fulfilment : whereas in 
 
396 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 the predicate giving expression to the substance, and the sub- 
 ject itself falling into the universal, we have the unity in which 
 that accent is heard no more. Thus in the proposition " God is 
 Being " the predicate is Being ; it represents the substance in 
 which the subject is dissolved away. Being is here meant not 
 to be predicate but essence : and in that way God seems to cease 
 to be what he is — by his place in the proposition — viz. the 
 permanent subject. The mind — far from getting further forward 
 in the passage from subject to predicate — feels itself rather 
 checked, through the loss of the subject, and thrown back, from 
 a sense of its loss, to the thought of the subject. Or,— since the 
 predicate itself is enunciated as a subject (as Being or as Es- 
 sence) which exhausts the nature of the subject, it again comes 
 face to face with the subject even in the predicate. — Thought 
 thus loses its solid objective ground which it had on the sub- 
 ject : yet at the same time in the predicate it is thrown back 
 upon it, and instead of getting to rest in itself it returns upon 
 the subject of the content. — To this unusual check and arrest 
 are in the main due the complaints as to the unintelligibility of 
 philosophical works, — supposing the individual to possess any 
 other conditions of education needed for understanding them.' 
 
 P. 66, § 32, On the relation of dogmatism and scepticism 
 see the introduction to Kant's Criticism of Pure Reason, and 
 compare Caird's Critical Philosophy of I. Kani, vol. i. chap. i. 
 
 P- 67, § 33. The subdivision of ' theoretical ' philosophy or 
 metaphysics into the four branches, Ontology, Cosmology, Psy- 
 chology (rational and empirical), and Natural Theology, is more 
 or less common to the whole Wolfian School. Wolf's special 
 addition to the preceding scholastic systems is found in the 
 conception of a general Cosmology. Metaphysics precedes 
 physics, and the departments of practical philosophy. In 
 front of all stands logic or rational philosophy. Empirical 
 psychology belongs properly to physics, but reasons of practical 
 convenience put it elsewhere. 
 
 P. 69, § 34. The question of the ' Seat of the Soul ' is well 
 known in the writings of Lotze {e.g. Meiaphysic, § 291). 
 
 Absolute actuosity. The Notio Dei according to Thomas 
 Aquinas, as well as the dogmatics of post-Reformation times, is 
 cuius purus (or actus purissimus). For God nihil potentiali- 
 tatis habet. Cf. Werke, xii. 228 : * Aristotle especially has con- 
 ceived God under the abstract category of activity. Pure acti- 
 
CHAPTER III, §§ 31-36. 397 
 
 vity is knowledge (ffiiffen)— in the scholastic age, actus fiurus— : 
 but in order to be put as activity, it must be put in its 
 "moments." For knowledge we require another thing which is 
 known : and which, when knowledge knows it, is thereby appro- 
 priated. It is implied in this that God — the eternal and self- 
 subsistent— eternally begets himself as his Son,— distinguishes 
 himself from himself. But what he thus distinguishes from 
 himself, has not the shape of an otherness : but what is distin- 
 guished is ipso facto identical with what it is parted from. God 
 is spirit : no darkness, no colouring or mixture enters this pure 
 light. The relationship of father and son is taken from organic 
 life and used metaphorically— the natural relation is only pic- 
 torial and hence does not quite correspond to what is to be 
 expressed. We say, God eteiTially begets his Son, God distin- 
 guishes himself from himself: and thus we begin from God, 
 saying he does this, and in the other he creates is utterly with 
 himself (the form of Love) : but we must be well aware that 
 God is this whole action itself. God is the beginning ; he does 
 this : but equally is he only the end, the totality : and as such 
 totality he is spirit. God as merely the Father is not yet the 
 true (it is the Jewish religion where he is thus without the 
 Son) : He is rather beginning and end : He is his presupposi- 
 tion, makes himself a presupposition (this is only another form 
 of distinguishing) : He is the eternal process.' 
 
 Nicolaus Cusanus speaks of God {De iocta Ignorantia, ii. i) 
 as infinita actualiias quae est actu omnts essendi possibilitas. 
 The term ' actuosity ' seems doubtful. 
 
 P. 73, § 36. Sensus eminentior. Theology distinguishes 
 three modes in which the human intelligence can attain a 
 knowledge of God. By the via causalitatis it argues that God 
 is ; by the via negationis, what he is not ; by the via eminen- 
 tiae, it gets a glimpse of the relation in which he stands to us. 
 It regards God i.e. as the cause of the finite universe ; but as 
 God is infinite, all that is predicated of him must be taken as 
 merely approximative {sensu etninentioH) and there is left a 
 vast remainder which can only be filled up with negations 
 [Durandus de S. Porciano on the Sentent. i. 3. i]. The sensus . 
 etJiineniior is the subject of Spinoza's strictures, Ep. 6 (56 in 
 Opp. ii. 202) : while Leibniz adopts it in the preface to ThJodice'e, 
 ' Les perfections de Dieu sont celles de nos ^mes, mais il les 
 poss^de sans bornes ; il est un ocean, dont nous n'avons requ 
 
398 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 que les gouttes ; il y a en nous quelque puissance, quelque con- 
 naissance, quelque bont6 ; mais elles sont toutes entiferes en Dieu.' 
 The via causalitatis infers e.g., from the existence of morality 
 and intelligence here, a Being whose will finds expression 
 therein : the via eminentiae infers that that will is good, and 
 that intelligence wise in the highest measure, and the via nega- 
 tionis sets aside in the conception of God all the limitations 
 and conditions to which human intelligence and will are subject. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 P. 80, § 38. The verses (forming part of the advice which 
 Mephistopheles, personating Faust, gives to the recently-arrived 
 pupil) stand in the original in a different order: beginning 
 „35ann t^at er bie X^eile in feincr ^anb," &c. The meaning of these 
 and the two preceding lines is somewhat as follows, in versifica- 
 tion even laxer than Goethe's : — 
 
 If you want to describe life and gather its meaning, 
 
 To drive out its spirit must be your beginning, 
 
 Then though fast in your hand lie the parts one by one 
 
 The spirit that linked them, alas! is gone. 
 
 And ' Nature's Laboratory ' is only a name 
 
 That the chemist bestows on't to hide his own shame. 
 
 One may compare Wilhelm Meisfer's Wanderjahre, iii. 3, where 
 it is remarked, in reference to some anatomical exercises : ' You 
 will learn ere long that building-up is more instructive than 
 tearing-down, combining more than separating, animating the 
 dead more than killing again what was killed already. . . . 
 Combining means more than separating : reconstructing more 
 than onlooking.' The first part of Faust appeared 1808: the 
 Wanderjahre, 1828-9. 
 
 P. 82, § 39. The article on the ' Relation of scepticism to 
 philosophy, an exposition of its various modifications, and com- 
 parison of the latest with the ancient '—in form a review of G. E. 
 Schulze's Criticism of Theoretical Philosophy— ^2^% republished 
 in vol. xvi. of Hegel's Werke (vol. i. of the Vermischte Schriften). 
 
 P. 87, § 42. In an earlier review of Kant's work {Werke, \. 
 83) on (AJldubeu unb 3BiJTen (an article in Schelling and Hegel's 
 Journal) Hegel attaches more weight to a factor in the critical 
 theory of knowledge, here neglected. Kant, he says, has — 
 
CHAPTER III, § 36 — CHAPTER IV, § 42. 399 
 
 within the limits allowed by his psychological terms of thought 
 — 'put (in an excellent way) the d priori of sensibility into the 
 original identity and multiplicity, and that as transcendental 
 imagination in the "higher power" of an immersion of unity in 
 multiplicity : whilst Understanding (33erfianb) he makes to con- 
 sist in the elevation to universality of this d priori synthetic 
 unity of sensibility,— whereby this identity is invested with a 
 comparative antithesis to the sensibility : and Reason (aJemunft) 
 is presented as a still higher power over the preceding compara- 
 tive antithesis, without however this universality and infinity 
 being allowed to go beyond the stereotyped formal pure in- 
 finity. This genuinely rational construction by which, though 
 the bad name " faculties " is left, there is in truth presented a 
 single identity of them all, is transformed by Jacobi into a 
 series of faculties, resting one upon another.' 
 
 P. 87, § 42. Fichte : cf. Werke, i. 420 : ' I have said before, 
 and say it here again, that my system is no other than the 
 Kantian. That means : it contains the same view of facts, but 
 in its method is quite independent of the Kantian exposition.' 
 * Kant, up to now, is a closed book.'— i. 442. There are two 
 ways of critical idealism. 'Either' (as Fichte) 'it actually de- 
 duces from the fundamental laws of intelligence, that system of 
 necessary modes of action, and with it, at the same time, the 
 objective conceptions thus arising, and thus lets the whole com- 
 pass of our conceptions gradually arise under the eyes of the 
 reader or hearer; or' (like Kant and his unprogressive dis- 
 ciples) ' it gets hold of these laws from anywhere and anyhow, 
 as they are immediately applied to objects, therefore on their 
 lowest grade (—on this grade they are called categories), and 
 then asseverates that it is by these that objects are determined 
 and arranged.' And i. 478 : ' I know that the categories which 
 Kant laid down are in no way pro%>ed by him to be conditions 
 of self-consciousness, but only said to be so : I know that space 
 and time and what in the original consciousness is inseparable 
 from them and fills them both, are still less deduced as such 
 conditions, for of them it is not even said expressly— as of the 
 categories— that they are so, but only inferentially. But I believe 
 quite as surely that I know that Kant had the thought of such 
 a system : that everything he actually propounds are fragments 
 and results of this system; and that his statements have meaning 
 and coherence only on this presupposition.' Cf. viii. 362. 
 
400 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 P. 89, §42. Transcendental unity of self-consciousness. Kant's 
 Kritik der reinen Vernun/i, § 16 : * The / think must be able to 
 accompany all my ideas. . . . This idea is an act of spontaneity. 
 ... I name it pure apperception ... or original apperception . . . 
 because it is that self-consciousness which can be accompanied 
 by none further. The unity of it I also call the transcendental 
 unity of self-consciousness, in order to denote the possibility of 
 cognition d priori from it.' 
 
 P. 92, § 44. Caput Mortuum : a term of the Alchemists to 
 denote the non-volatile precipitate left in the retort after the spirit 
 had been extracted : the fixed or dead remains, * quando spiritus 
 animam sursum vexit.' 
 
 P. 92, § 45, Reason and Understanding. In the Wolfian 
 School {e.g. in Baumgarten's Metaphysik, § 468) the term intel- 
 lect (33erflanb) is used of the general faculty of higher cognition, 
 while ratio (SScnmnft) specially denotes the power of seeing 
 distinctly the connexions of things. So Wolff ( VemUnftige 
 Gedanken von Gott, &c. § 277) defines 95er<^anb as 'the faculty 
 of distinctly representing the possible,' and QSernunft (§ 368) as 
 'the faculty of seeing into the connexion of truths.' It is on 
 this use of Reason as the faculty of inference that Kant's use of 
 the term is founded : though it soon widely departs from its 
 origin. For upon the ' formal ' use of reason as the faculty of 
 syllogising, Kant superinduces a transcendental use as a ' faculty 
 oi principles,^ while the understanding is only ' a faculty of rules' 
 ' Reason,' in other words, ' itself begets conceptions,' and 
 ' maxims, which it borrows neither from the senses nor from the 
 understanding.' {Kritik d. r. Vern., Dialektik, Einleit. ii. A.) 
 And the essential aim of Reason is to give unity to the various 
 cognitions of understanding. While the unity given by under- 
 standing is 'unity of a possible experience,' that sought by 
 reason is the discovery of an unconditioned which will com- 
 plete the unity of the former {Dial. Einleit. iv), or of 'the 
 totality of the conditions to a given conditioned.' {Dial, vii.) 
 
 It is this distinction of the terms which is dominant in Fichte 
 and Hegel, where SSevfianb is the more practical intellect which 
 seeks definite and restricted results and knowledges, while 
 33crnunft is a deeper and higher power which aims at complete- 
 ness. In Goethe's more reflective prose we see illustrations of 
 this usage : e.g. Wilh. Meister's Wanderjahre, i. it is said to be 
 the object of the 'reasonable' man ' bag entgcgcngcfclte ju ubcrf^auen 
 
CHAPTER IV, §§ 42-45. 401 
 
 utib in Uebftcitnlimmung ^u bringen ' : or Bk, ii. Reasonable men 
 when they have devised something verfldnbig to get this or that 
 difficulty out of the way, &c. Goethe, in his SpHiche in Prosa 
 (896), Werke, iii. 281, says 'Reason has for its province the 
 thing in process (ba« aBcrbenbf), understanding the thing com- 
 pleted (bag ©etrcibene) : the former does not trouble itself about 
 the purpose, the latter asks not whence. Reason takes delight 
 in developing ; understanding wishes to keep everything as it 
 is, so as to use it.' (Similarly in Eckermann's Convers. Feb. 13, 
 1829.) Cf. Oken, 9iaturp^ilo[cp:^ie, § 2914. 93erfianb ifl aWicvocoemu3, 
 i^ernunft aJJacrocceimu^. 
 
 Kant's use of the term Reason, coupled with his special 
 view of Practical Reason and his use of the term Faith (®laiibe), 
 leads on to the terminology of Jacobi. In earlier writings 
 Jacobi had insisted on the contrast between the superior au- 
 thority of feeling and faith (which are in touch with truth) and 
 the mechanical method of intelligence and reasoning (33ev|ianb 
 and iJcrnuuft). At a later period however he changed and fixed 
 the nomenclature of his distinction. What he had first called 
 ©laube he latterly called 9Sernuiift,— which is in brief a ' sense for 
 the supersensible ' — an intuition giving higher and complete or 
 total knowledge— an immediate apprehension of the real and the 
 true. As contrasted with this reasonable faith or feeling, he 
 regards '-Bertkiib as a mere faculty of inference or derivative 
 knowledge, referring one thing to another by the rule of identity. 
 
 This distinction which is substantially reproduced by Coleridge 
 (though with certain clauses that show traces of Schellingian 
 influence) has connexions — like so much else in Jacobi— with 
 the usage of Schopenhauer, ' Nobody,' says Jacobi, ' has ever 
 spoken of an animal 93cniunft : a mere animal 33eifianb however 
 we all know and speak of.' (Jacobi's Werke, iii. 8.) Schopen- 
 hauer repeats and enforces the remark. All animals possess, 
 says Schopenhauer, the power of apprehending causality, of cog- 
 nising objects : a power of immediate and intuitive knowledge 
 of real things : this is i>cifiaub. But ^crnunft, which is peculiar 
 to man, is the cognition of truth (not of reality) : it is an abstract 
 judgment with a sufficient reason ( Welt ah IV. i. § 6). 
 
 One is tempted to connect the modem distinction with an 
 older one which goes back in its origin to Plato and Aristotle, 
 but takes form in the Neo-Platonist School, and enters the Latin 
 world through Boethius. Consol. Phil. iv. 6 : Igitur uti est ad 
 
 VOL. II. D d 
 
402 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 intellectum ratiocinatio, ad id quod est id quodgignitur, ad aeter- 
 nitatem tempus, and in v. 4 there is a full distinction of sensus, 
 imaginatio, ratio and intelligentia in ascending order. Ratio 
 is the discursive knowledge of the idea {imiversali consideratione 
 perpendit) : intelligentia apprehends it at once, and as a simple 
 forma (pura mentis acie contuetur) : [cf. Stob. Eel. i. 826-832 : 
 Porphyr. Sentent. 15]. Reasoning belongs to the human species, 
 just as intelligence to the divine alone. Yet it is assumed— in 
 an attempt to explain divine foreknowledge and defend freedom 
 - -that man may in some measure place himself on the divine 
 standpoint (v. 5). 
 
 This contrast between a higher mental faculty {mens) and a 
 lower {ratio) which even Aquinas adopts from the interpretation 
 of Aristotle {Summa Theol. i. 79, 9) is the favourite weapon in 
 the hands of mysticism. After the example of Dionysius Areop., 
 Nicolaus of Cusa, Reuchlin, and other thinkers of the Renais- 
 sance depreciate mere discursive thought and logical reasoning. 
 It is the inner tnens — like a simple ray of light — penetrating by 
 an immediate and indivisible act to the divine — which gives us 
 access to the supreme science. This simplex intelligentia, — 
 superior to imagination or reasoning — as Gerson says, Consid. 
 de Th. 10, is sometimes named mens, sometimes spiritus, the light 
 of intelligence, the shadow of the angelical intellect, the divine 
 light. From Scotus Erigena to Nicolas of Cusa one tradition is 
 handed down : it is taken up by men like Everard Digby (in his 
 Theoria Analytica) and the group of Cambridge Platonists and 
 by Spinoza in t he seventeenth century, and it reappears, profoundly 
 modified, in the German idealism between 1790 and 1820. 
 
 P. 99, § 48. 'Science of Logic' ; Hegel's large work on the 
 subject, published between 1812-16. The discussions on the 
 Antinomies belong chiefly to the first part of it. 
 
 P. 102, § 50. ' Natural Theology,' here to be taken in a 
 narrower sense than in p. ^i, where it is equivalent to Rational 
 Theology in general. Here it means ' Physico-theology ' — the 
 argument from design in nature. 
 
 P. 103, § 50. Spinoza — defining God as * the union of thought 
 with extension.' This is not verbally accurate ; for according to 
 Ethica, i. pr. 11, God, or the substance, consists of infinite attri- 
 butes, each of which expresses the eternal and infinite essence, 
 liut Spinoza mentions of ' attributes ' only two : Ethica, ii. pr. i. 
 Thought is an attribute of God : pr. 2, Extension is an attribute, 
 
CHAPTER IV, §§ 45-54. 403 
 
 of God. And he adds, Eihica, i. pr. 10, Schol. * All the attributes 
 substance has were always in it together, nor can one be pro- 
 duced by another.' And in Ethica, ii. 7. Sch. it is said : ' Think- 
 ing substance and extended substance is one and the same 
 substance which is comprehended now under this, now under 
 that attribute.' 
 
 P. 110, § 54. 'Practical in the true sense of the word.' Cf. 
 Kant, Werke, Ros. and Sch. i. 581 : 'A great misunderstanding, 
 exerting an injurious influence on scientific methods, prevails 
 with regard to what should be considered " practical " in such 
 sense as to justify its place in practical philosophy. Diplomacy 
 and finance, rules of economy no less than rules of social inter- 
 course, precepts of health and dietetic of the soul no less than the 
 body, have been classed as practical philosophy on the mere 
 ground that they all contain a collection of practical propositions. 
 But although such practical propositions differ in mode of state- 
 ment from the theoretical propositions which have for import 
 the possibility of things and the exposition of their nature, they 
 have the same content. " Practical," properly so called, are only 
 those propositions which relate to Liberty under laws. All 
 others whatever are nothing but the theory of what pertains to 
 the nature of things— only that theory is brought to bear on the 
 way in which the things may be produced by us in conformity 
 with a principle ; /. e. the possibility of the things is presented 
 as the result of a voluntary action which itself too may be 
 counted among physical causes.' And Kant, Werke, iv. 10. 
 * Hence a sum of practical precepts given by philosophy does 
 not form a special part of it (co-ordinate with the theoretical) 
 merely because they are practical. Practical they might be, 
 even though their principle were wholly derived f'-om the theo- 
 retical knowledge of nature,— as technico-practical rules. They 
 are practical in the true sense, when and because their principle 
 is not borrowed from the nature-conception (which is always 
 sensuously conditioned) and rests therefore on the supersensible, 
 which the conception of liberty alone makes knowable by formal 
 laws. They are therefore ethico-practical, i. e. not merely 
 precepts and rules with this or that intention, but laws without 
 antecedent reference to ends and intentions.* 
 
 P. Ill, § 54. Eudaemonism. But there is Eudaemonism and 
 Eudaemonism ; as Cf. Hegel, Werke, i. 8. ' The time had come 
 when the infinite longing away beyond the body and the world 
 D d 2 
 
404 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 had reconciled itself with the reality of existence. Yet the 
 reality which the soul was reconciled to — the objective which 
 the subjectivity recognised — was actually only empirical exist- 
 ence, common world and actuality. . . . And though the recon- 
 ciliation was in its heart and ground sure and fast, it still needed 
 an objecti\ e form for this ground : the very necessity of nature 
 made the blind certitude of immersion in the reality of empirical 
 existence seek to provide itself with a justification and a good 
 conscience. This reconciliation for consciousness was found in 
 the Happiness-doctrine : the fixed point it started from being 
 the empirical subject, and what it was reconciled to, the vulgar 
 actuality, whereon it might now confide, and to which it might 
 surrender itself without sin. The profound coarseness and utter 
 vulgarity, which is at the basis of this happiness-doctrine, has 
 its only elevation in its striving after justification and a good 
 conscience, which however can get no further than the objec- 
 tivity of mere intellectualism. 
 
 * The dogmatism of eudaemonism and of popular philosophy 
 (3luftldrung) therefore did not consist in the fact that it made 
 happiness and enjoyment the supreme good. For if Happiness 
 be comprehended as an Idea, it ceases to be something empirical 
 and casual— as also to be anything sensuous. In the supreme 
 existence, reasonable act (X^un) and supreme enjoyment are 
 one. So long as supreme blessedness is supreme Idea it matters 
 not whether we try to apprehend the supreme existence on the 
 sideof its ideality, — which, as isolated may be first called reason- 
 able act— or on the side of its reality — which as isolated may be 
 first called enjoyment and feeling. For reasonable act and supreme 
 enjoyment, ideality and reality are both ahke in it and identical. 
 Every philosophy has only one problem — to construe, supreme 
 blessedness as supreme Idea. So long as it is by reason that 
 supreme enjoyment is ascertained, the distinguishability of the 
 two at once disappears : for this comprehension and the infinity 
 which is dominant in act, and the reality and finitude which is 
 dominant in enjoyment, are taken up into one another. The 
 controversy with happiness becomes a meaningless chatter, 
 when happiness is known as the blessed enjoyment of the eternal 
 intuition. But what was called eudaemonism meant — it must 
 be said— an empirical happiness, an enjoyment of sensation, not 
 the eternal intuition and blessedness.' 
 
 P. 112, § 55. Schiller. Ueber die aesthetische Erziehung des 
 
CHAPTER IV, §§ 54-60. 405 
 
 Menschen (1795), l8th letter. 'Through beauty the sensuous 
 man is led to form and to thought ; through beauty the intel- 
 lectual man is led back to matter and restored to the sense- 
 world. Beauty combines two states which are opposed to one 
 another.' Letter 25. 'We need not then have any difficulty 
 about finding a way from sensuous dependence to moral 
 liberty, after beauty has given a case where liberty can com- 
 pletely co-exist with dependence, and where man in order to 
 show himself an intelligence need not make his escape from 
 matter. If— as the fact of beauty teaches — man is free even in 
 association with the senses, and if— as the conception necessarily 
 involves — liberty is something absolute and supersensible, there 
 can no longer be any question how he comes to elevate himself 
 from limitations to the absolute : for in beauty this has already 
 come to pass.' Cf. Ueber Anmuth und Wiirde (1793). 'It is 
 in a beautiful soul, then, that sense and reason, duty and inclina- 
 tion harmonize ; and grace is their expression in the appearance. 
 Only in the service of a beautiful soul can nature at the same 
 time possess liberty.' (See Bosanquet's History of Aesthetic.) 
 
 P. 115, § 60. The quotation in the note comes from § %"] of 
 the Kritik der Urtheilskraft [Werke, ed. Ros. and Sch. iv. 
 357). 
 
 P. 120, § 60. Fichte, Werke, i. 279. 'The principle of life 
 and consciousness, the ground of its possibility, is (as has been 
 shown) certainly contained in the Ego : yet by this means there 
 arises no actual life, no empirical life in time — and another life 
 is for us utterly unthinkable. If such an actual life is to be 
 possible, there is still needed for that a special impulse (9liiilop) 
 striking the Ego from the Non-ego. According to my system, 
 therefore, the ultimate ground of all actuality for the Ego is an 
 original action and re-action between the Ego and something 
 outside it, of which all that can be said is that it must be com- 
 pletely opposed to the Ego. In this reciprocal action nothing 
 is brought into the Ego, nothing foreign imported ; everything 
 that is developed from it ad infinitutn is developed from it 
 solely according to its own laws. The Ego is merely put in 
 motion by that opposite, so as to act ; and without such a first 
 mover it would never have acted ; and, as its existence consists 
 merely in action, it would not even have existed. But the 
 source of motion has no further attributes than to set in motion, 
 to be an opposing force which as such is only felt. 
 
4o6 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 ' My philosophy therefore is reahstic. It shows that the con- 
 sciousness of finite natures cannot at all be explained, unless we 
 assume a force existing independently of them, and completely 
 opposed to them ; — on which as regards their empirical exist- 
 ence they are dependent. But it asserts nothing further than 
 such an opposed force, which is merely felt, but not cognised, 
 by finite beings. All possible specifications of this force or 
 non-ego, which may present themselves ad infinitum in our 
 consciousness, my system engages to deduce from the specify- 
 ing faculty of the Ego. . . . 
 
 'That the finite mind must necessarily assume outside it some- 
 thing absolute (a 2)ing;aiufic^), and yet must on the other hand 
 acknowledge that this something only exists for the mind (is 
 a necessary noiimenon) : this is the circle which may be in- 
 finitely expanded, but from which the finite mind can never 
 issue.' Cf. Fichte's Werke, i. 248, ii. 478. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 P. 121, § 62. F. H, Jacobi {Werke, v. 82) in his Woldemar 
 (a romance contained in a series of letters, first published as 
 a whole in 1781) writes: 'The philosophical understanding 
 (SSerflaub) is jealous of everything unique, everything immediately 
 certain which makes itself true, without proofs, solely by its 
 existence. It persecutes this faith of reason even into our 
 inmost consciousness, where it tries to make us distrust the 
 feeling of our identity and personality.' 'What is absolutely 
 and intrinsically true,' he adds (v. 122), ' is not got by way of 
 reasoning and comparison : both our immediate consciousness 
 (QBiffen) — I am — and our conscience (©cnjiffcn) are the work of a 
 secret something in which heart, understanding, and sense 
 combine.' 'Notions (93e3riffe), far from embalming the living, 
 really turn it into a corpse ' (v. 380). 
 
 Cf. Fichte's words ( Werke, ii. 255), Slug bcm ®eh?iffen aflein flatnmt 
 bie aBatjrtjcit, &c. 
 
 P. 122, § 62, The Letters on the doctrine of Spinoza, pub- 
 lished in 1785, were re-issued in 1789 with eight supplements. 
 
 *A science,' says Jacobi in his latest utterance {Werke, 
 iv, pref. xxx.) ' is only a systematic register of cognitions 
 mutually referring to one another — the first and last point 
 in the series is wanting.' 
 
CHAPTER IV, § 60 — CHAPTER V, § 63. 407 
 
 P. 123, § 62. Lalande's dictum is referred to by Fries 
 {Populdre Vorlesungen iiber Sternkunde, 1 813) quoted by Jacobi 
 in his Werke, ii. 55. What Lalande has actually written in the 
 preface to his work on astronomy is that the science as he 
 understands it has no relation to natural theology — in other 
 words, that he is not writing a Bridgewater treatise. 
 
 P. 123, § 63, Jacobi, Werke, ii. 222. ' For my part, I regard 
 the principle of reason as all one with the principle of life.* And 
 "• 343 • ' Evidently reason is the true and proper life of our 
 nature.' It is in virtue of our inner tendency and instinct towards 
 the eternal (iRic^tung unb Siticb auf bag (Swigc),— of our sense for the 
 supersensible— that we, human beings, really subsist (iv. 6. 152). 
 And this Dvgan bcr aiernel^mung beg Uebctrinnlic^cii is Reason (iii. 
 203, &c.). 
 
 The language of Jacobi fluctuates, not merely in words, but 
 in the intensity of his intuitionalism. Thus, e.g. iii. 32 : ' The 
 reason man has is no faculty giving the science of the true, but 
 only a presage ' (Sl^nbung beg SBai^ren). ' The belief in a God,' he 
 says, at one time (iii. 206) ' is as natural to man as his upright 
 position ' : but that belief is, he says elsewhere, only ' an inborn 
 devotion (Sliibac^t) before an unknown God.' Thus, if we have 
 an immediate awareness (ffiiJTen) of God, this is not knowledge 
 or science (SBiffenfc^aft). Such intuition of reason is described 
 (ii. 9) as ' the faculty of presupposing the intrinsically (an jii^) 
 true, good, and beautiful, with full confidence in the objective 
 validity of the presupposition.' But that object we are let see 
 only in feeling (ii. 61). ' Our philosophy,' he says (iii. 6) 'starts 
 from feeling— of course an objective and pure feeling.' 
 
 P. 124, § 63. Jacobi {Werke, iv. a, p. 211) : 'Through faith 
 (®laubc) we know that we have a body.' Such immediate know- 
 ledge of our own activity — 'the feeling of I am, I act' (iii. 411) 
 — the sense of ' absolute self-activity ' or freedom (of which the 
 ' possibility cannot be cognised,' because logically a contradic- 
 tion) is what Jacobi calls 'Jlnfcf^auung (Intuition). He distinguishes 
 a sensuous, and a rational intuition (iii. 59). 
 
 P. 125, § 63. Jacobi expressly disclaims identification of his 
 ©laubcwith the faith of Christian doctrine {Werke, iv. a, p. 210). 
 In defence he quotes from Hume, Inquiry V, and from Reid, 
 passages to illustrate his usage of the term 'belief— by the 
 distinction between which and faith certain ambiguities are no 
 doubt avoided. 
 
4o8 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 P. 129, § 66. Kant had said ^Concepts without intuitions are 
 empty.' It is an exaggeration of this half-truth-(the other half 
 is Intuitions without concepts are blind) that is the basis of 
 these statements of Jacobi (and of Schopenhauer)— a view of 
 which the following passage from Schelling {Werke, ii. 125) is 
 representative. ' Concepts (SBeflriffe) are only silhouettes of reality. 
 They are projected by a serviceable faculty, the understanding, 
 which only comes into action when reality is already on the 
 scene,— which only comprehends, conceives, retains what it re- 
 quired a creative faculty to produce. . . . The mere concept is 
 a word without meaning. ... All reality that can attach to it is 
 lent to it merely by the intuition (9lnfcl}auung) which preceded it. 
 . . . Nothing is real for us except what is immediately given us, 
 without any mediation by concepts, without our feeling at 
 liberty. But nothing reaches us immediately except through 
 intuition.' He adds, however, * Intuition is due to the activity 
 of mind (®cif^) : it demands a disengaged sense (frcicr (Sinn) and 
 an intellectual organ (geijiigcg Organ).' 
 
 P. 134. Cicero: De Natura Deorum, i. 16; ii. 4, De quo 
 autem omnium natura consentit, id verum esse necesse est ; cf. 
 Seneca, Epist. cxvii. 6. The principle is common to Stoics 
 and Epicureans : it is the maxim of Catholic truth Quod semper, 
 quod ubique, quod ah omnibus credittan est — equivalent to 
 Aristotle's 6 Traa- ^oku, tovt dvai (})afMfv. — But as Aristotle remarks 
 (An. Post. i. 31) TO KadoXov Koi fVl naaip a8LvaToi> ala-QuviO-Qai. 
 
 Jacobi : Werke, vi. 145. ' The general opinion about what is 
 true and good must have an authority equal to reason.' 
 
 P. 136, § 72. Cf. Encyclop. § 400 : ' That the heart and the 
 feeling is not the form by which anything is justified as religious, 
 moral, true, and just, and that an appeal to heart and feeling 
 either "means nothing or means something bad, should hardly 
 need enforcing. Can any experience be more trite than that 
 hearts and feelings are also bad, evil, godless, mean, &c. ? Ay, 
 that the heart is the source of such feelings only, is directly said 
 in the words : Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, &c. In 
 times when the heart and the sentiment are, by scientific 
 theology and philosophy, made the criterion of goodness, 
 religion, and morality, it is necessary to recall these trivial 
 experiences.' 
 
CHAPTER V, S 66 — CHAPTER VI, § 82. 409 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 p. 145, § 80. Goethe ; the reference is to Werke, ii. 268 
 (9iatur unb J?unfl) : 
 
 9Ber ®ro§cS rrifl, tjtu§ ftc^ jufammcnraffcn : 
 3n bet a3ef(^tdnhtn9 jcigt fic^ erfl bet aJJoijicr, 
 Unb bag @efe| nur fanu ini6 gteif^eit geben. 
 
 Such 'limitation' of aim and work is a frequent lesson in 
 Wilhelm Meistet^s Wanderjahre, e.g. i. ch. 4. * Manysidedness 
 prepares, properly speaking, only the element in which the one- 
 sided can act. . . . The best thing is to restrict oneself to a handi- 
 work.' And i. ch. 12 : 'To be acquainted with and to exercise 
 one thing rightly gives higher training than mere tolerableness 
 (halfness) in a hundred sorts of things.' And ii. ch. 12 : 'Your 
 general training and all establishments for the purpose are 
 fool's farces.' 
 
 P. 147, § 81. Cf. Fichte, Werke, ii. 37. ' Yet it is not we who 
 analyse : but knowledge analyses itself, and can do so, because 
 in all its being it is a/<?r-.y^//"(gur;(t^),' &c. 
 
 P. 149, § 81. Plato, the inventor of Dialectic. Sometimes 
 (on the authority of Aristotle, as reported by Diog. Laert. ix. 25), 
 Zeno of Elea gets this title ; but Hegel refers to such statements 
 as Diog. Laeri. ii, 34 rpWov 5« YlXarmv npoa-idtjKt ror SiaXeKTiKov 
 Xoyovj Koi (Tf\((Tiovpyrj(T( ttjv ({)i\ocro(f)lav. 
 
 Protagoras. But it is rather in the dialogue Afeno, pp. 81-97, 
 that Plato exhibits this view of knowledge. Cf. Phaedo, 72 E, 
 and Phaedrus, 245. 
 
 Parmenides; especially see Plat. Parnien. pp. 142, 166; cf. 
 Hegel, Werke, xiv. 204. 
 
 With Aristotle dialectic is set in contrast to apodictic, and 
 treated as (in the modern sense) a quasi-inductive process (Ar. 
 Top. Lib. viii.) : with the Stoics, dialectic is the name of the 
 half-rhetorical logic which they, rather than Aristotle, handed 
 on to the schoolmen of the Middle Ages. 
 
 P. 150, § 81. The physical elements are fire, air, earth, and 
 water. Earthquakes, storms, &c., are examples of the ' meteoro-' 
 logical process.' Cf. Encyclop. §§ 281-289. 
 
 P. 152, § 82. Dialectic ; cf; Werke, v. 326 seqq. 
 
 P. 154, § 82. Mysticism; cf. Mill's Logic, bk. v, ch. 3, § 4: 
 * Mysticism is neither more nor less than ascribing objective 
 
4IO NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 existence to the subjective creations of the mind's own faculties, 
 to mere ideas of the intellect ; and believing that by watching 
 and contemplating these ideas of its own making, it can read in 
 them what takes place in the world without,' Mill thus takes 
 it as equivalent to an ontological mythology — probably a rare 
 use of the term. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 P. 166, § 85. The Absolute. The term, in something like 
 its modem usage, is at least as old as Nicolaus Cusanus. God, 
 according to him, is the absoluta omnium quidditas {Apol. 406), 
 the esse absolutum, or tpsum esse in existentibus [Ue ludo Globi, 
 ii. 161 a), the unum absolutum, the vis absoluta, or possibilitas 
 absoluttty or valor absolutus ; absoluta vita, absoluta ratio : ab- 
 soluta essendi forma. On this term and its companion infinitus 
 he rings perpetual changes. But its distinct employment to 
 denote the ' metaphysical God ' is much more m.odern. In 
 Kant, e.g. the 'Unconditioned' (2)a3 Unbebingte) is the meta- 
 physical, corresponding to the religious, conception of deity ; and 
 the same is the case with Fichte, who however often makes use 
 of the adjective 'absolute.' It is with Schelling that the term is 
 naturalised in philosophy : it already appears in his works of 
 1793 and 1795: and from him apparently it finds its way into 
 Fichte's Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre of 1 801 {Werke, ii. 
 13) ' The absolute is neither knowing nor being ; nor is it iden- 
 tity, nor is it indifference of the two ; but it is throughout merely 
 and solely the absolute.' 
 
 The term comes into English philosophical language through 
 Coleridge and later borrowers from the German. See Ferrier's 
 Institutes of Metaphysic^ Prop, xx, and Mill's Examination of 
 Hamilton, chap. iv. 
 
 P. 158, § 86. Cf. Schelling, iii. 372: 1 = 1 expresses the 
 identity between the ' I,' in so far as it is the producing, and 
 the ' I ' as the produced ; the original synthetical and yet iden- 
 tical proposition : the cogito—sum of Schelling. 
 
 P. 159. Definition of God as Ens realissimum, e.g. Meier's 
 Baumgarten's Metaphysic, § 605. 
 
 Jacobi, Werke, iv. 6, thus describes Spinoza's God. 
 
 As to the beginning cf. Fichte, Werke, ii. 14 (speaking of 
 ' absolute knowing ') : 'It is not a knowing of something, nor is 
 
CHAPTER VI, § 82 — CHAPTER VH, § 87. 41 1 
 
 it a knowing of nothing (so that it would be a knowing of some- 
 what, but this somewhat'be nothing) : it is not even a knowing 
 of itself, for it is no knowledge at all o/;—nor is it a knowing 
 (quantitatively and in relation), but it is (the) knowing (abso- 
 lutely qualitatively). It is no act, no event, or that somewhat 
 is in knowing ; but it is just the knowing, in which alone all 
 acts and all events, which are there set down, can be set 
 down.* 
 
 History of Philosophy ; cf. Hegel, IVerke, i. 165. ' If the Ab- 
 solute, like its phenomenon Reason, be (as it is) eternally one 
 and the same, then each reason, which has turned itself upon 
 and cognised itself, has produced a true philosophy and solved 
 the problem which, like its solution, is at all times the same. 
 The reason, which cognises itself, has in philosophy to do only 
 with itself: hence in itself too lies its whole work and its 
 activity ; and as regards the inward essence of philosophy 
 there are neither predecessors nor successors. 
 
 * Just as little, as of constant improvements, can there be talk 
 of " peculiar views " of philosophy. . . . The true peculiarity of 
 a philosophy is the interesting individuality, in which reason has 
 organised itself a form from the materials of a particular age ; 
 in it the particular speculative reason finds spirit of its spirit, 
 flesh of its flesh ; it beholds itself in it as one and the same, as 
 another living >eing. Each philosophy is perfect in itself, and 
 possesses totality, like a work of genuine art. As little as the 
 works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare 
 had known them, could have seemed to them mere preliminary 
 exercises for themselves — but as cognate spiritual powers;— so 
 little can reason in its own earlier formations perceive only useful 
 preparatory exercises.' Cf. Schelling, iv. 401. 
 
 P. 160, § 86. Parmenides (ap. Simplic. Phys.): of the two 
 ways of investigation the first is that it z's, and that not-to-be 
 is not. 
 
 17 fjifp OTTtos earn ft Koi a»j ovk eoTi fXTj ehai. 
 
 P. 161, § 87. The Buddhists. Cf. Hegel, IVerJte, xi. 387. 
 Modern histories of Buddhism insist upon the purely ethico-re- 
 ligious character of the teaching. Writers like von Hartmann 
 {Religionsphilosophie^ p. 320) on the contrary hold that Buddhism 
 carried out the esoteric theory of Brahmanism to the consequence 
 that the abstract one is nothing. According to Vassilief, Le 
 Bouddhisme, p. 318 seqq., one of the Buddhist metaphysical 
 
412 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 schools, the Madhyamikas, founded by N&gardjuna 400 years 
 after Buddha, taught that All is Void. — Such metaphysics were 
 probably reactions of the underlying Brahmanist idea. 
 
 But generally Buddhism (as was not unnatural 60 years ago) 
 is hardly taken here in its characteristic historical features. 
 
 P. 167, § 88. Aristotle, Phys. i. 8 (191 a. 26) : ' Those philo- 
 sophers who first sought the truth and the real substance of 
 things got on a false track, like inexperienced travellers who fail 
 to discover the way, and declared that nothing can either come 
 into being or disappear, because it is necessary that what comes 
 into being should come into being either from what is or from 
 what is not, and that it is from both of these impossible : for 
 what is does not become (it already is), and nothing would 
 become from what is not.' 
 
 (5) is an addition of ed, 3 (1830) ; cf. Werke, xvii. 181. 
 
 P. 168, § 88. The view of HeracHtus here taken is founded 
 on the interpretation given by Plato (in the Theaetetus, 152; 
 Cratylus, 401) and by Aristotle, of a fundamental doctrine of 
 the Ephesian— which however is expressed in the fragments 
 by the name of the everliving fire. The other phrase (Ar. Met. 
 i, 4) is used by Aristotle to describe the position, not of Hera- 
 clitus, but of Leucippus and Democritus. Cf. Plutarch, adv. 
 Colotem, 4. 2 AT;/idx/3iT0k- Stopt'fcToi /^i) fj.a\\ov to 8ev fj to fiT]dev 
 
 fivai ; cf. Simplic. in Ar. PAys. fol. 7. 
 
 P. 169, § 89. !Dafel}n: Determinate being. Cf. Schelling, i. 
 209. * Being (©e^n) expresses the absolute, Determinate being 
 CSafcijn) a conditional, 'positing': Actuality, one conditioned in 
 a definite sort by a definite condition. The single phenomenon 
 in the whole system of the world has actuality ; the world of 
 phenomena in general has !^afet)n ; but the absglutely-posited, 
 the Ego, is. I am is all the Ego can say of itself 
 
 P. 171, § 91. Being-by-self: ^\\\'-^\i^-.\i\)\\. 
 
 Spinoza, Epist. 50, figura non aliud quatn determinatio et 
 determinatio negatio est. 
 
 P. 172, § 92. ©veiije (limit or boundary), and @c^ran!c (barrier 
 or check) are distinguished in Werke, iii. 128-139 (see Stirling's 
 Secret of Hegel, i. 377 seqq.). Cf. Kant's remark, Krit. d. r. 
 Vernunft, p. 795, that Hume only ciiifd^vanft our intellect, oJ}ne 
 if)n ju begvenjen. 
 
 P. 173, § 92. Plato, Timaeus, c. 35 (formation of the world- 
 soul) : ' From the individual and ever-identical essence {oldia) 
 
CHAPTER VII, §§ 87-95. 413 
 
 and the divisible which is corporeal, he compounded a third 
 intermediate species of essence. . . . And taking these, being 
 three, he compounded them all into one form {Ibia), adjusting 
 perforce the unmixable nature of the other and the same, and 
 mingling them all with the essence, and making of three one 
 again, he again distributed this total into as many portions as 
 were fitting, but each of them mingled out of the same and the 
 other and the essence.' 
 
 P. 175, § 94. Philosophy. Cf. Schelling, Werke, ii. ^77. 'A 
 various experience has taught me that for most men the greatest 
 obstacle to the understanding and vital apprehension of philo- 
 sophy is their invincible opinion that its object is to be sought 
 at an infinite distance. The consequence is, that while they 
 should fix their eye on what is present (baS ©fgcniravtigc), every 
 effort of their mind is called out to get hold of an object which 
 is not in question through the whole inquiry.' ... * The aim of 
 the sublimest science can only be to show the actuality,— in the 
 strictest sense the actuality, the presence, the vital existence 
 (J)afct)n) — of a God in the whole of things and in each one. . . . 
 Here we deal no longer with an extra-natural or supernatural 
 thing, but with the immediately near, the alone-actual to which 
 we ourselves also belong, and in which we are.' 
 
 P. 177, § 95. Plato's Philebtts, ch. xii-xxiii (pp. 23-38) : cf. 
 Werke, xiv. 214 seqq. : ' The absolute is therefore what in one 
 unity is finite and infinite.' 
 
 P. 178. Idealism of Philosophy : cf. Schelling, ii. 67. 'Every 
 philosophy therefore is and remains Idealism ; and it is only 
 under itself that it embraces realism and idealism ; only that 
 the former Idealism should, not be confused with the latter, 
 which is of a merely relative kind.' 
 
 Hegel, Werke, iii. 163. 'The proposition that the finite is 
 " ideal " constitutes Idealism. In nothing else consists the Ideal- 
 ism of philosophy than in recognising that the finite has no 
 genuine being. . . . The contrast of idealistic and realistic 
 philosophy is therefore of no importance. A philosophy that 
 attributed to finite existences as such a genuine ultimate absolute 
 being would not deserve the name philosophy. . . . By "ideal" 
 is meant existing as a representation in consciousness : what- 
 ever is in a mental concept, idea or imagination is " ideal " : 
 " ideal " is just another word for " in imagination,"— something 
 not merely distinct from the real, but essentially not real. The 
 
414 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 mind indeed is the great idealist : in the sensation, representa- 
 tion, thought of the mind the fact has not what is called real 
 existence ; in the simplicity of the Ego such external being is 
 only suppressed, existing /<?r me, and "ideally" in me. This 
 subjective idealism refers only to the representational form, by 
 which an import is mine.' 
 
 P. 180, § 96. The distinction of nature and mind as real and 
 ideal is especially Schelling's : See e.g. his Einleitung, &c. iii. 
 272. ' If it is the problem of Transcendental Philosophy to 
 subordinate the real to the ideal, it is on the contrary the problem 
 of the philosophy of nature to explain the ideal from the real.' 
 
 P. 183, § 98. Newton : see Scholium at the end of the Prin- 
 cipia, and cf. Optics, iii. qu. 28. 
 
 Modern Atomism, besides the conception of particles or 
 molecules, has that of mathematical centres of force. 
 
 Kant, IVerke, v. 379 (ed. Rosenk.). ' The general principle of 
 the dynamic of material nature is that all reality in the objects of 
 the external senses must be regarded as moving force : whereby 
 accordingly so-called solid or absolute impenetrability is banished 
 from natural science as a meaningless concept, and repellent 
 force put in its stead ; whereas true and immediate attraction 
 is defended against all the subtleties of a self-misconceiving 
 metaphysic and declared to be a fundamental force necessary 
 for the very possibility of the concept of matter.' 
 
 P. 184, § 98. Abraham GotthelfKastner (1719-180x3), professor 
 forty-four years at Gottingen, enjoyed in the latter half of 
 the eighteenth century a considerable repute, both in literature 
 and in mathematical science. Some of his epigrams are still 
 quoted. 
 
 P. 190, § 102. The two 'moments' of number Unity, and 
 Sum (3lnja^t), may be compared with the Greek distinction 
 between one and dpidfxos (cf. Arist. Phys. iv. 12 fAax'o"TOf dpidfios 
 f) bvai). According to Rosenkranz {Leben Hegels) the classifica- 
 tion of arithmetical operations often engaged Hegel's research. 
 Note the relation in Greek between XoytKoj/ and XoyuniKov. Cf. 
 Kant's view of the * synthesis ' in arithmetic. 
 
 P. 193, § 103. Intensive magnitude. Cf. Kant, Kritik der 
 reinen Vernunft, p. 207, on Anticipation of Perception (SfBatjrs 
 nel^mung), and p. 414, in application to the question of the soul's 
 persistence. 
 
 P. 195, § 104. Not Aristotle, but rather Simplicius on the 
 
CHAPTER VII, §§ 95-104. 415 
 
 Physics of Aristotle, fol. 306 : giving Zeno's argument against 
 the alleged composition of the line from a series of points. What 
 you can say of one supposed smaU real unit, you can say of a 
 smaller, and so on ad infinitum. (Cf. Burnet's Early Greek 
 Philosophy, p. 329.) 
 
 P. 196, § 104. The distinction between imagination and 
 intellect made by Spinoza in Ep. xii. (olim xxix.) in 0pp. ed. 
 Land vol. ii. 40 seqq. is analogous to that already noted (p. 402) 
 between ratio and intellegentia, and is connected, as by Boethius, 
 with the distinction which Plato, Timaeus, yj, draws between 
 eternity {aiiav) and time. 
 
 The infinite {Eth. i. prop. 8. Schol. l) is the ' absolute affirma- 
 tion of a certain nature's existence,' as opposed to finitude 
 which is really ex parte negatio. ' The problem has always been 
 held extremely difficult, if not inextricable, because people did 
 not distinguish between what is concluded to be infinite by its 
 own nature and the force of its definition, and what has no ends, 
 not in virtue of its essence, but in virtue of its cause. It was 
 difficult also because they did not distinguish between what is 
 called infinite because it has no ends, and that whose parts 
 (though we may have a maximum and minimum of it) we 
 cannot equate or explicate by any number. Lastly because they 
 did not distinguish between what we can only understand 
 {intelligere), but not imagine, and what we can also imagine.' 
 
 To illustrate his meaning, Spinoza calls attention to the 
 distinction of substance from mode, of eternity from duration. 
 We can ' explicate ' the existence only of modes by duration : 
 that of substance, 'by eternity, i.e. by an infinite fruition of 
 existence or being ' [per aeternitatem, hoc est, infiniiam existendi, 
 sive, inviia latinitate, essendi fruitionem). The attempt there- 
 fore to show that extended substance is composed of parts is 
 an illusion, — which arises because we look at quantity ' ab- 
 stractly or superficially, as we have it in imagination by means 
 of the senses.' So looTcing at it, as we are liable to do, a 
 quantity will be found divisible, finite, composed of parts and 
 manifold. But if we look at it as it really is,— as a Substance 
 — as it is in the intellect alone — (which is a work of difficulty), 
 it will be found infinite, indivisible, and unique. * It is only 
 therefore when we abstract duration and quantity from sub- 
 stance, that we use time to determine duration and measure 
 to determine quantity, so as to be able to imagine them. 
 
4l6 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 Eternity and substance, on the other hand, are no objects of 
 imagination but only of intellect ; and to try to explicate them 
 by such notions as measure, time, and number — which are only 
 modes of thinking or rather of imagining — is no better than 
 to fall into imaginative raving.' 'Nor will even the modes of 
 Substance ever be rightly understood, should they be con- 
 founded with this sort of enfia rationis ' (/. e. modi cogitandi 
 subserving the easier retention, explication and imagination 
 of things understood) ' or aids to imagination. For when we do 
 so, we separate them from substance, and from the mode in 
 which they flow from eternity, without which they cannot be 
 properly understood.' (Cf. Hegel's IVerke, i. 63.) 
 
 The verses from Albr. von Haller come from his poem on 
 Eternity (1736). Hegel seems to quote from an edition before 
 1776, when the fourth line was added in the stanza as it thus 
 finally stood : — 
 
 3d& ^ufe wnije^eure 3a!^(cn, 
 ©cbiirge SDiidiotun auf, 
 
 Sd^ uicl^e 3eit auf Beit unb 2Bett auf SEBelten ^in, 
 llnb icenn i^ auf ber aWarc^ be« eubUd^cn nun bin, 
 Unb ijon bcr futd^terlid^cn ^c^t 
 STOit (Sd^itinbeln ftieber no^ bit fc^^e, 
 3fi alle 2Kac^t ber 3af)t, »etmct)rt mit taufenb SKaten, 
 9io(i) ui^t ein !£t)eil con bir. 
 3c^ tilge fie, unb bu liegfi ganj »or ntir. 
 Kant, Kritik d. r. Vernunft, p. 641. ' Even Eternity, however 
 eerily sublime may be its description by Haller,' &c. 
 
 P. 197, § 104. Pythagoras in order of time probably comes 
 between Anaximenes (of Ionia) and Xenophanes (of Elea). But 
 the mathematical and metaphysical doctrines attributed to the 
 Pythagorean are known to us only in the form in which they 
 are represented in Plato and Aristotle, i.e. in a later stage of 
 development. The Platonists (cf. Arist. Met. i. 6 ; xi. i. 12 ; xii. 
 1.7; cf. Plat. Rep. p. 510) treated mathematical fact as mid-way 
 between * sensibles ' and ' ideas ' ; and Aristotle himself places 
 mathematics as a science between physical and metaphysical 
 (theological) philosophy. 
 
 The tradition (referred to p. 198) about Pythagoras is given 
 by lamblichus. Vita Pyth. § 115 seqq. : it forms part of the later 
 Neo-Pythagorean legend, which entered literature in the first 
 centuries of the Christian era. 
 
CHAPTER VII, § 104 — CHAPTER VW, § II9. 417 
 
 P. 201, § 107. Hebrew hymns: e.g. Psalms Ixxiv. and civ. ; 
 Proverbs viii. and Job xxxviii. Vetus verbum est, says Leibniz 
 (ed. Erdmann, p. 162), Deum omnia pondere, mensura,numero, 
 fecisse. 
 
 P. 202, § 108. The antinomy of measure. These logical 
 puzzles are the so-called fallacy of Sorites (a different thing from 
 the chain-syllogism of the logic-books) ; cf. Cic. Acad. ii. 28, 29 ; 
 De Divin. ii. 4— and the ^oKaKftoi \ cf. Horace, Epist. ii. 1-45. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 P. 211, § 113. Self- relation— (f!c^) auf fic^ bcjieljtn. 
 
 P. 213, § 115. The 'laws of thought' is the magniloquent 
 title given in the Formal Logic since Kant's day to the prin- 
 ciples or maxims {principia, ©runbfd^c) which Kant himself de- 
 scribed as ' general and formal criteria of truth.' They include 
 the so-called principle of contradiction, with its developments, 
 the principle of identity and excluded middle : to which, with 
 a desire for completeness, eclectic logicians have ,added the 
 Leibnitian principle of the reason. Hegel has probably an eye 
 to Krug and Fries in some of his remarks. The three laws 
 may be. compared and contrasted with the three principles, 
 — homogeneity, specification, and continuity of forms, in Kant's 
 Kritik d. r. Vern. p. 686. 
 
 P. 217, § 117. Leibniz, Nouveaux Essais, Liv. ii, ch. 27, § 3 
 (ed. Erdmann, p. 273 : cf. fourth Letter to Clarke). // ny a 
 point deux individus indiscernables. Un gentilhomme d esprit 
 de mes amis, en parlant avec moi en prdsence de Madame 
 VElectrice dans lejardin de Herrenhausen, crut qu'il irouverait 
 bien deux feuilles entierement semblables. Madame VElectrice 
 Pen ddfia, et il courut longtems en vain pour en chercher. 
 
 The principle of individuation or indiscemibility is : * If two 
 individuals were perfectly alike and equal and, in a word, indis- 
 tinguishable by themselves, there would be no principle of indivi- 
 duation : (Leibniz, ed. Erdm. p. 277) Poser deux choses indis- 
 cernables est poser la meme chose sous deux noms (p. 756). Prin- 
 cipiu7n individuationis idem est quod absolutae specijicationis 
 qud res iia sit determinata, ut ab aliis omnibus distingui possit. 
 P. 221, § 119. Polarity. Schelling, ii. 489. 'The law of 
 Polarity is a universal law of nature '; cf. ii. 459: 'It is a first 
 principle of a philosophic theory of nature to have a view (in 
 VOL. II. E e 
 
4l8 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 the whole of nature), on polarity and dualism.' But he adds 
 (476), *It is time to define more accurately the concept of 
 polarity.* So Oken, Naturphilosophie : § 76 : 'A force consist- 
 ing of two principles is called Polarity.' % IT- '' Polarity is the 
 first force which makes its appearance in the world.' § 81 : ' The 
 original movement is a result of the original polarity.' 
 
 P. 223, § 119. Cf. Fichte, ii. 53. ' To everything but this the 
 logically trained thinker can rise. He is on his guard against 
 contradiction. But, in that case, how about the possibility of 
 the maxim of his own logic that we can think no contradic- 
 tion ? In some way he must have got hold of contradiction 
 and thought it, or he could make no communications about it. 
 Had such people only once regularly asked themselves how they 
 came to think the merely possible or contingent (the not-neces- 
 sary), and how they actually do so ! Evidently they here leap 
 through a not-being, not-thinking, &c., into the utterly un- 
 mediated, self-initiating, free,— into beent non-being, — in short, 
 the above contradiction, as it was laid down. With consistent 
 thinkers the result of this incapacity is nothing but the utter 
 abolition of freedom, — the most absolute fatalism and Spinozism. 
 
 P. 227, §121. Leibniz(ed. Erdmann,p. 515). ' The principle 
 of la raison diterminante is that nothing ever occurs without 
 there being a cause for it, or at least a determinant reason, /'. e. 
 something which may serve to render a reason h priori why 
 that is existent rather than in any other way. This great 
 principle holds good in all events.' Cf. p. 707. ' The principle 
 of " sufficient reason " is that in virtue of which we consider 
 that no fact could be found true or consistent, no enunciation 
 truthful, without there being a sufficient reason why it is so 
 and not otherwise. . . . When a truth is necessary, we can find 
 the reason of it by analysis, resolving it into simpler ideas and 
 truths, until we come to primitive ideas. . . . But the sufficient 
 reason ought also to be found in contingent truths or truths of 
 fact, /. e. in the series of things spread through the universe of 
 creatures, or the resolution into particular reasons might go 
 into a limitless detail : . . . and as all this detail embraces only 
 other antecedent, or more detailed contingencies, . . . the 
 sufficient or final {dernilre) reason must be outside the succes- 
 sion or series of this detail of contingencies, however infinite it 
 might be. And it is thus that the final reason of things must 
 be in a " necessary substance," in which the detail of the changes 
 
CHAPTER VIII, §§ 1 19-126. 419 
 
 exists only emitunier, as in the source,— and it is what we call 
 God.' {Monadology, §§ 32-38.) 
 
 Hence the supremacy of final causes. Thj3 0pp. ed. Erd- 
 mann, p. 678 : Itafit ut efficientes causae pendeant a finalibus, 
 et spiritualia sint natura priora materialibus. Accordingly he 
 urges, p. 155, that final cause has not merely a moral and 
 religious value in ethics and theology, but is useful even in 
 physics for the detection of deep-laid truths. Cf. p. 106: 
 Cest sanctifier la Philosophic que de /aire couler ses ruisseaux 
 de la fontaine des attributs de Dieu. Bien loin d'exclure les 
 causes finales et la consideration d^un etre agissant avec sagesse^ 
 ^est de Id. qu'ilfaut tout ddduire en Physique. Cf. also Prin- 
 cipes de la Nature (Leibn. ed. Erdm. p. 716) : ' It is surprising 
 that by the sole consideration of efficient causes or of matter, 
 we could not render a reason for those laws of movement dis- 
 covered in our time. II y faut recourir aux causes finales.^ 
 
 P. 228, § 121 Socrates. The antitheses between Socrates and 
 the Sophists belongs in the main to the Platonic dialogues, — not 
 to the historical Socrates. It is the litemry form in which the 
 philosophy of Plato works out its development through the 
 criticism of contemporary opinions and doctrines. And even in 
 Plato's writings the antagonism is very unlike what later inter- 
 pretations have made out of it. 
 
 P. 231, § 124. Thing by itself (thing in itself) the 2)ing;an=Tt(^. 
 
 P. 235, § 126. Cf. Encycl. § 334 ( Werke, viii. i. p. 41 1). * In 
 empirical chemistry the chief object is the particularity of the 
 matters and products, which are grouped by superficial abstract 
 features which make impossible any system in the special detail. 
 In these lists, metals, oxygen, hydrogen, &c. — metalloids, sulphur, 
 phosphorus appear side by side as simple chemical bodies on 
 the same level. The great physical variety c^ these bodies 
 must of itself create a prepossession against such coordina- 
 tion ; and their chemical origin, the process from which 
 they issue, is clearly no less various. But in an equally chaotic 
 way, more abstract and more real processes are put on the same 
 level. If all this is to get scientific form, every product ought to 
 be determined according to the grade of the concrete and com- 
 pletely developed process from which it essentially issues, and 
 which gives it its peculiar significance ; and for that purpose it 
 is not less essential to distinguish grades in abstractness or 
 reality of the process. Animal and vegetable substances in any 
 £62 
 
420 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 case belong to a quite other order: so little can their nature be 
 understood from the chemical process, that they are rather 
 destroyed in it, and only the way of their death is apprehended. 
 These substances, however, ought above all to serve to counter- 
 act the metaphysic predominant in chemistry as in physics,— the 
 ideas or rather wild fancies of the unalterability of matters under 
 all circumstances, as well as the categories of the composition 
 and the consistence of bodies from such matters. We see it 
 generally admitted that chemical matters lose in combination 
 \^^ properties which they show in separation : and yet we find 
 the idea prevailing that they are the same things without the 
 properties as they are with them, — so that as things with these 
 properties they are not results of the process.' — Cf. Werke, vii. 
 a. 372 : * Air does not consist of oxygen and nitrogen : but these 
 are the forms under which air is put,' cf. ib. 403. 
 
 P. 241, § 131. Fichte's SonnenklarerBerichta-^^ezxtd in 1801. 
 
 P. 247, § 136. Herder's Gott : Gesprdche iiber Spinoza's 
 System, 1787, 2nd ed. 1800. ' God is, in the highest and unique 
 sense of the word, Force, /. e. the primal force of all forces, the 
 soul of all souls ' (p. 63), * All that we call matter, therefore, 
 is more or less animate : it is a realm of efficient forces. One 
 force predominates : otherwise there were no one, no whole ' 
 (p. 207). * The supreme being (!Dafe^n) could give its creatures 
 nothing higher than being. {Theophron.) But, my friend, 
 being and being, however simple in the concept, are in their 
 estate very different ; and what do you suppose, Philolaus, 
 marks its grades and differences ? {Phil.) Nothing but forces. 
 In God himself we found no higher conception ; but all his forces 
 were only one. The supreme force could not be other than su- 
 preme goodness and wisdom, ever-living, ever-active. ( Theoph.) 
 Now you yourself see, Philolaus, that the supreme, or rather the 
 All (for God is not a supreme unit in a scale of beings like him- 
 self)^ could not reveal himself otherwise than in the universe 
 as active. In him nothing could slumber, and what he expressed 
 was himself. He is before everything, and everything subsists 
 in him : the whole world an expression, an appearance of his 
 ever-living, ever-acting forces ' (p. 200). 
 
 ' It was the mistake of Spinoza,' says Herder, * to be unduly 
 influenced by the Cartesian phraseology. Had he chosen the 
 conception of force and effect, everything would have gone 
 easier, and his system become much more distinct and coherent. 
 
CHAPTER VIII, §§ 126-140. 421 
 
 * Had he developed the conception of power, and the con- 
 ception of matter, he must in conformity with his system, neces- 
 sarily have come to the conception of forces, which work as 
 well in matter as in organs of thinking : he would in that case 
 have regarded power and thought as forces, /. e. as one.' (Cf. H. 
 Spencer, ' Force, the Ultimate of Ultimates.' First Princ. p. 169.) 
 
 According to Rosenkranz {Leben Hegeh, p. 223) there exists 
 in manuscript a criticism by Hegel on the second edition of 
 Herder's God. Herder's Dialogue belongs to the controversy 
 aroused by Jacobi's letters on Spinoza. 
 
 P. 250, § 136. Newton. Leibniz charges him with the view 
 that * God needs from time to time remonter sa Tnontre, other- 
 wise it would cease going : that his machine requires to be 
 cleaned {ddcrasser) by extraordinary aid ' (ed. Erdm. p. 746). 
 
 P. 252, § 140. The verses quoted occur in Goethe's Werke^ 
 ii. 376, under the heading SlKevbingg. Originally the first four 
 lines appeared in Haller's poem Die menschlichen Tugenden, 
 thus— 
 
 3n« Snnre b«t 9ldtut bringt ftin erfni^affncr ®etji : 
 
 3u gtiirftic^, »t?enn fie notl^ bie dufre <S(^ale toetfi ! 
 
 (To nature's heart there penetrates no mere created mind : 
 
 Too happy if she but display the outside of her rind.) 
 
 [Hegel— reading toti^t for teeiji — takes the second line as 
 
 Too happy, if he can but know the outside of her rind.] 
 Goethe's attack upon a vulgar misuse of the lines belongs to 
 his dispute with the scientists. His verses appeared in 1820 
 as Heiteres ReimstUck at the end of Heft 3 zur Morphologie,—oi 
 which the closing section is entitled Freundlicher Zuruf{Werke, 
 xxvii. 161), as follows :— 
 
 „3n^ 3nnte ber Ulatur," 
 
 •D bu $^ia(!er!— 
 „JE)rinflt feiii erfc^affnet ©eiji." 
 
 ^©liirffeltg! torat jie nnr 
 2)ie aufre ©(^ate rttif t.^" 
 3)05 I)6r' i(^ ffiiljig 3a^re hjtcber^olcn, 
 3d) pu(!^c brauf, abet »erflot)ten : 
 ©age mir taufcnb taufenbmale: 
 SlKed giebt fu rei^lic^ unb gem; 
 iWahir :^at toeber .ffern 
 
422 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 Sl((e« ifi fie mit einem fKale. 
 
 [The last seven lines may be thus paraphrased in con- 
 tinuation : 
 
 I swear — of course but to myself— as rings within my ears 
 That same old warning o'er and o'er again for sixty years, 
 And thus a thousand thousand times I answer in my mind : — 
 With gladsome and ungrudging hand metes nature from her store: 
 She keeps not back the core, 
 Nor separates the rind, 
 But all in each both rind and core has evermore combined.] 
 
 P. 254, § 140. Plato and Aristotle: cf. Plato, Phaedrus, 
 247 A {(f>d6i>os yap ?|a) Oeiov xopov torarai) ; Timaeus, 29 E ; and 
 Aristotle, Metaph. i. 2. 22. 
 
 P. 256, § 140. Goethe : SdmnitL Werke, iii, 203 {Maxime 
 und Refleononen). ©egen gro^e ^Sprjiige cines ^nbem giebt c8 fein 
 9?ettuJig«ntittet old bie Siebc. Cf. Schiller to Goethe, 2 July, 1796. 
 * How vividly I have felt on this occasion . . . that against surpas- 
 sing merit nothing but Love gives liberty ' (ba^ <i& bcm a3ovtrefflic^cn 
 Qegenuber fcinc grei^eit giebt ats tie 2 if be). 
 
 * Pragmatic' This word, denoting a meddlesome busybody in 
 older English and sometimes made a vague term of abuse, has 
 been in the present century used in English as it is here 
 employed in German. 
 
 According to Polybius, ix. I. 2, the npayfuiTtKos rponos r^y 
 iaropiai is that which has a directly utilitaiian aim. So Kant, 
 Foundation of Metaph. of Ethic {Werke, viii. 41, note): *A 
 history is pragmatically composed when it renders prudent, /. e. 
 instructs the world how it may secure its advantage better or at 
 least as well as the ages preceding.' Schelling (v. 308) quotes 
 in illustration of pragmatic history-writing the words of Faust 
 to Wagner (Goethe, xi. 26) : 
 
 SBa3 i^r bm ©eifl bet 3citen f>cipt, 
 
 !r)ag ift im ®runb ber J&errcn eignet ©eifl, 
 
 3n bent bie Sciten |t(!^ befpiegeln. 
 
 Cf. also Hegel, Werke, ix. 8. ' A second kind of reflectional 
 history is the pragmatic. When we have to do with the past 
 and are engaged with a distant world, the mind sees rising before 
 it a present, which it has from its own action as a reward for its 
 trouble. The events are different ; but their central and uni- 
 
CHAPTER VIII, §§ 140-153. 423 
 
 versal fact, their structural plan is identical. This abolishes the 
 past and makes the event present. Pragmatic reflections, how- 
 ever abstract they be, are thus in reality the present, and vivify 
 the tales of the past with the life of to-day. — Here too a word 
 should specially be given to the moralising and the moral 
 instructions to be gained through history,— for which it was 
 often studied. . . . Rulers, statesmen, nations, are especially 
 bidden learn from the experience of history. But what experi- 
 ence and history teach is that nations and governments never 
 have learned anything from history, or acted upon teaching 
 which could have been drawn from it.* 
 
 Cf. Froude : Divorce of Catherine, p. 2. ' The student (of 
 history) looks for an explanation (of political conduct) in elements 
 which he thinks he understands — in pride, ambition, fear, avarice, 
 jealousy, or sensuality.' 
 
 P. 257, § 141, Cf. Goethe, xxiii, 298. 'What is the outside of 
 an organic nature but the ever-varied phenomenon of the inside? 
 This outside, this surface is so exactly adapted to a varied, com- 
 plex, delicate, inward structure that it thus itself becomes an 
 inside: both aspects, the outside and the inside, standing in 
 most direct correlation alike in the quietest existence and in the 
 most violent movement.' 
 
 P. 260, § 143. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vemunfi, 2nd ed. 
 p. 266. 
 
 P. 269, § 147. Cf. Schelling, IVerke, v. 290 (cf. iii. 603). ' There 
 are three periods of history, that of nature, of destiny, and of 
 providence. These three ideas express the same identity, but 
 in a different way. Destiny too is providence, but recognised in 
 the real, as providence, is also destiny, but beheld (angefc^aut) 
 in the ideal.' 
 
 P. 275, § 151. On the relation between Spinoza and Leibniz 
 cf. Hegel, IVerke, iv. 187-193. It would be a mistake, however, 
 to represent Leibniz as mainly engaged in a work of conscious 
 antagonism to Spinoza. 
 
 P. 277, § 153. Jacobi.— Jacobi (like Schopenhauer) insists 
 specially on the distinction between grounds (@riint»e) — which 
 are formal, logical, and verbal, and causes (Urfaci^cn) — which 
 carry us into reality and life and nature. To transform the 
 mere Because into the cause we must (he says) pass from 
 logic and the analytical understanding to experience and the 
 inner life. Instead of the timelessness of simultaneity which 
 
424 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 characterises the logical relation of ground and consequent, 
 the nexus of cause and effect introduces the element of time, 
 — thereby acquiring reality (Jacobi, Werke, iii. 452). The con- 
 ception of Cause— meaningless as a mere category of abstract 
 thought — gets reality as a factor in experience, ein (Si-fa^runggbegriff, 
 and is immediately given to us in the consciousness of our own 
 causality (Jacobi, Werke, iv. 145-158). Cf. Kant, Kritik der 
 reinen Vern. p. 116. 
 
 P. 283, § 158. The Amor intellectualis Dei (Spinoza, Eth. 
 V. 32) is described as a consequence of the third grade of cogni- 
 tion, viz. the scientia intiiitiva which 'proceeds from an ade- 
 quate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to 
 the adequate cognition of the essence of things (ii. 40, Schol. 2). 
 From it arises (v. 27), the highest possible acquiescentia mentis, 
 in which the mind contemplates all things sub specie aeternitatis 
 (v. 29), knows itself to be in God and sees itself and all things 
 in their divine essence. But this intellectual love of mind 
 towards God is part of the infinite love wherewith God loves 
 himself (v. 36) * From these things we clearly understand in 
 what our salvation or blessedness or liberty consists: to wit, in 
 the constant and eternal love towards God, or in the love of 
 God towards men ' (Schol. to v. 36). 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Page 289, § 161. Evolution and development in the stricter 
 sense in which these terms were originally used in the seven- 
 teenth and eighteenth centuries imply a theory of preformation, 
 according to which the growth of an organic being is simply 
 a process of enlarging and filling out a miniature organism, 
 actual but invisible, because too inconspicuous. Such was the 
 doctrine adopted by Leibniz {Considerations sur le principe 
 de vie; Systeme nouveau de la Nature \ &c.). According to 
 it development is no real generation of new parts, but only an 
 augmentation into bulk and visibility of parts already outlined. 
 This doctrine of preformation (as opposed to epigenesis) is 
 carried out by Charles Bonnet, who in his Considerations sur 
 tes corps organises (1762) propounds the further hypothesis 
 that the 'germs' from which living beings proceed contain, 
 enclosed one within another, the germs of all creatures yet to 
 be. This is the hypothesis of * Emboiiement.' 'The system 
 
CHAPTER VIII, § 152--CHAPTER IX, § r6l. 425 
 
 which regards generations as mere educts' says Kant {Kritik 
 der Urtheilskraft, § 80; Werke, iv. 318) * is called that of 
 individual preformation or the evolution theory : the system 
 which regards them as products is called Epigenesis, — which 
 might also be called the theory of generic preformation, con- 
 sidering that the productive powers of the generants follow 
 the inherent tendencies belonging to the family characteristics, 
 and that the specific form is therefore a ' virtual * preformation. 
 In this way the opposing theory of individual preformation 
 might be better called the involution theory, or theory of 
 ©infc^ac^tctung {Emboitemenf). Cf. Leibniz {Werke, Erdmann, 
 715). ' As animals generally are not entirely bom at conception 
 or generation, no more do they entirely perish at what we 
 call death ; for it is reasonable that what does not commence 
 naturally, does not finish either in the order of nature. Thus 
 quitting their mask or their rags, they only return to a 
 subtler theatre, where however they can be as sensible and 
 well regulated as in the greater. . . . Thus not only the souls, 
 but even the animals are neither generable nor perishable : they 
 are only developed, enveloped, re-clothed, unclothed,— trans- 
 formed. The souls never altogether quit their body, and do not 
 pass from one body into another body which is entirely new to 
 them. There is therefore no metempsychosis, but there is 
 metamorphosis. The animals change, take and quit only parts : 
 which takes place little by little and by small imperceptible 
 parcels, but continually, in nutrition : and takes place suddenly, 
 notably but rarely, at conception, or at death, which make them 
 gain or lose much all at once.' 
 
 The theory of Emboitement or Enveloppement, according to 
 Bonnet {Considerations, &c. ch. i) is that ' the germs of all the 
 organised bodies of one sp>ecies were inclosed {renfermds) one in 
 another, and have been developed successively.' So according 
 to Haller {Physiology, Tome vii. § 2) * it is evident that in plants 
 the mother-plant contains the germs of several generations ; and 
 there is therefore no inherent improbability in the view that 
 tous les enfans, excepti un, fussent renferm^s dans Povaire de 
 la pretniire Fills d'Eve.' Cf. Weismann's Continuity of the 
 "Germ-plasma. Yet Bonnet {Contemplation de la Nature, part 
 vii. ch. 9, note 2), says, ' The germs are not enclosed like boxes 
 or cases one in another, but a germ forms part of another germ, 
 as a grain forms part of the plant in which it is developed.' 
 
426 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 P. 293, § 163. Rousseau, Contrat Social, liv. ii. ch. 3. 
 
 P. 296, § 165. The 'adequate' idea is a sub-species of the 
 'distinct.' When an idea does not merely distinguish a thing 
 from others (when it is clear), or in addition represent the 
 characteristic marks belonging to the object so distinguished 
 (when it is distinct), but also brings out the farther characteristics 
 of these characteristics, the idea is adequate. Thus adequate is 
 a sort of second power of distinct. (Cf. Baumeister's Instit. 
 Philos. Ration. 1765, §§ 64-94.) Hegel's description rather 
 agrees with the ' complete idea ' ' by which I put before my mind 
 singly marks sufficient to discern the thing represented from 
 all other things in every case, state, and time' (Baumeister, ib. 
 § 88). But cf. Leibniz, ed. Erdm. p. 79 : notitia adaequata. 
 
 P. 298, § 166. Cf. Baumeister, Instit. Phil. Rat. § 185: 
 Judicium est idearum conjunctio vel separatio. 
 
 P. 299, § 166. Punctum saliens: ih& punctutn sanguineum 
 saliens of Harvey {de Generat. Animal, exercit. 17), or first 
 appearance of the heart : the (myfifi alfiaTivt] in the egg, of which 
 Aristotle {Hist. Anim. vi. 3) says rovro ro ar]\Li\.ov rrqda <cat Ktytirai 
 aanep tfiylruxov. 
 
 P. 301, § 169. Cf. Whately, Lo£^ic (Bk. ii. ch. i, § 2), 'Of 
 these terms that which is spoken of is called the subject ; that 
 which is said of it, ihe predicate.' 
 
 P. 303, § 171. Kant, Kritik d^r reinen Vemunft (p. 95, 2nd 
 ed.) § 9. 
 
 P. 304, § 172. Cf. Jevons, Principles of Science, ch. 3, 'on 
 limited identities ' and ' negative propositions.' 
 
 P. 309. Ear-lobes. The remark is due to Blumenbach : cf. 
 Hegel's Werke, v. 285. 
 
 P. 312. Colours, /. e. painters' colours ; cf. Werke, vii. i. 
 314 (lecture-note). * Painters are not such fools as to be 
 Newtonians : they have red, yellow, and blue, and out of these 
 they make their other colours.' 
 
 P. 315, § 181. For the genetic classification of judgments and 
 syllogisms and the passage from the former to the latter 
 compare especially Lotze's Logic, Book i. And for the compre- 
 hensive exhibition of the systematic process of judgment and 
 inference see B. Bosan quel's Logic, or the Morphology of Know- 
 ledge. The passage from Hegel's Werke, v. 139, quoted at the 
 hfead of that work is parallel to the sentence in p. 318, 'The 
 interest, therefore,' «S:c. 
 
CHAPTER IX, §§ 163-193. 427 
 
 P. 320, § 186. The letters I-P-U of course, stand for 
 Individual, Particular, and Universal. 
 
 P. 321, § 187. Fourth figure. This so-called Galenian figure 
 was differentiated from the first figure by the separation of the 
 five moods, which (after Arist. An. pr. i. 7 and ii. i) Theo- 
 phrastus and the later pupils, down at least to Boethius, had 
 subjoined to the four recognised types of perfect syllogism. But 
 its Galenian origin is more than doubtful. 
 
 P. 325, § 190. Cf. Mill's Logic, Bk. ii. ch. 3. 'In every 
 syllogism considered as an argument to prove the conclusion 
 there is a petiiio principii' 
 
 H jel's Induction is that strictly so called or complete in- 
 duction, the argument from the sum of actual experiences — that 
 per enumerationem simplicem, and fiw ■navrav. Of course except 
 by accident or by artificial arrangement such completeness is 
 impossible in rerum tiatura. 
 
 P. 326, § 190. The ' philosophy of Nature ' referred to here is 
 probably that of Oken and the Schellingians ; but later critics 
 {e.g. Riehl, Philosoph. Criticismus, iii. 120) have accused Hegel 
 himself of even greater enormities in this department. 
 
 P. 328, § 192, Elementarlehre '. Theory of the Elements, 
 called by Hamilton {Lectures on Logic, i. 65) Stoicheiology as 
 opposed to methodology. Cf. the Port Royal Logic. Kant's 
 Kritik observes the same division of the subject. 
 
 P. 332, § 193. Anselm, Proslogium, c. 2. In the Monologium 
 Anselm expounds the usual argument from conditioned to un- 
 conditioned {Est igitur unum aliquid, quod solum maxime et 
 sufnme omnium est; per quod est quidquid est bonum vel 
 magnum, et omnino quidquid aliquid est. Monol. c. 3). But 
 in the Proslogium he seeks an argument quod nullo ad se pro- 
 bandum quam se solo tndigeret,—i.e. from the conception of 
 (God as) the highest and greatest that can be {aliquid quo 
 nihil majus cogitari potest) he infers its being {sic ergo vere 
 EST aliquid quo majus cogitari non potest, ut nee cogitari possit 
 non esse). The absolute would not be absolute if the idea of it 
 did not ipso facto imply existence. 
 
 Gaunilo of Marmoutier in the Liber pro insipiente m3.de the 
 objection that the fact of such argument being needed showed 
 that idea and reality were prima facie different. And in fact 
 the argument of Anselm deals with an Absolute which is object 
 rather than subject, thought rather than thinker ; in human 
 
428 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 consciousness realised, but not essentially self-affirming — im- 
 plicit (an5J!(f>) only, as said in pp. 331, 333. And Anselm 
 admits c. 1 5 Domine, non solum es, quo majus cogitari neguit, 
 sed es quiddam majus quant cogitari potest (transcending our 
 thought). 
 
 P. 333, line 2. This sentence has been transposed in the 
 translation. In the original it occurs after the quotation- from 
 the Latin in p. 332. 
 
 P. 834, § 194. Leibniz : for a brief account of the Monads 
 see Caird's Crit. Philosophy of I. Kant, i. 86-95. 
 
 A monad is the simple substance or indivisible unity cor- 
 responding to a body. It is as simple what the world is as 
 a multiplicity: it 'represents,' i.e. concentrates into unity, the 
 variety of phenomena : is the expression of the material in the 
 immaterial, of the compound in the simple, of the extended 
 outward in the inward. Its unity and its representative capacity 
 go together (cf. Lotze, Mikrokosmus). It is the ' present which is 
 full of the future and laden with the past' (ed. Erdm. p. 197); 
 the point which is all-embracing, the totality of the universe. 
 And yet there are monads— in the plural. 
 
 P. 334, § 194. Fichte, IVerke, i. 430. * Every thorough-going 
 dogmatic philosopher is necessarily a fatalist.' 
 
 P. 338, § 195. Cf. Encyclop. § 463. 'This supreme inward- 
 ising of ideation (Sovjlettung) is the supreme self-divestment of 
 intelligence, reducing itself to the mere being, the general 
 space of mere names and meaningless words. The ego, which 
 is this abstract being, is, because subjectivity, at the same time 
 the power over the different names, the empty link which fixes 
 in itself series of them and keeps them in fixed order.' 
 
 Contemporaneously with Hegel, Herbart turned psychology 
 in the line of a ' statics and dynamics of the mind.' See (be- 
 sides earlier suggestions) his De Aitentionis mensura causisque 
 primariis (1822) and his Ueber die Moglichkeit und Nothiven- 
 digkeit, Mathematik auf Psychologie anzuwenden (1822). 
 
 P. 340, § 198. Civil society : distinguished as the social and 
 economical organisation of the bourgeoisie, with their particu- 
 larist-universal aims, from the true universal unity of citoyens 
 in the state or ethico-political organism. 
 
 P. 345, § 204. Inner design : see K^XiVs Kritik der Urtheils- 
 kraft, § 62. 
 
 Aristotle, De Anima, ii. 4 (415. b. 7) (}>avepbv 8' iy Koi ov 
 
CHAPTER IX, §§ 193-230. 429 
 
 tviKa f) ^vxf) curia : ii. 2 fwijv Xtyo/uef rqu 5i' avroi Tpo(f>rjv re 
 Koi av$r](riv kqi (pOiaiv, 
 
 P. 347, § 206. Neutral first water, cf. Encyclop. § 284, ' with- 
 out independent individuality, without rigidity and intrinsic 
 determination, a thorough-going equilibrium.' Cf. Werke, vii. 
 6. 168. ' Water is absolute neutrality, not ]ike salt, an indi- 
 vidualised neutrality ; and hence it was at an early date called 
 the mother of everything particular.' 'As the neutral it is the 
 solvent of acids and alkalis.' Cf. Oken's Lehrbuch der Natur- 
 philosophie, §§ 294 and 432. 
 
 P. 348, § 206. Conclude = befd^tie^cn : Resolve = entfd^tiefcn. 
 Cf. Chr. Sigwart, Kleine Schri/ien, ii. 115, segq. 
 
 P. 359, § 216. Aristotle, De Anim. General, i. (726. b. 24) 
 i] \e\p av(v \//^v;(t»c^ff Bwdfittos ovk tort x^^^P aWa fiovov 6fi(i>irvfiOv. 
 
 Arist. Metaph. viii. 6 (1045. b. Il) ot 5« (Xeyovo-t) avvGarw 
 fj (rvvdeafiov ^vxrjs (Tufiari to ^c. 
 
 P. 360, § 218. Sensibility, &c. This triplicity (as partly 
 distinguished by Haller after Glisson) of the functions of organic 
 life is largely worked out in ScheUing, ii. 491. 
 
 P. 361, § 219. Cf. Schelling, ii. 540. As walking is a 
 constantly prevented falling, so life is a constantly prevented 
 extinction of the vital process. 
 
 P. 367, § 229. Spinoza (Eih. i. def. l) defines causa sui as 
 id cujus essentia ifivolvit existentiam, and (in def. 3) defines 
 substantia as id quod in se est et per se concipitur. 
 
 Schelling : <?. g. Darstelhmg tneines Systems der Philosophie 
 (1801), {Werke, iv. 114): 'I call reason the absolute reason, 
 or reason, in so far as it is thought as total indifference of sub- 
 jective and objective.' 
 
 P. 367, § 230. ' Mammals distinguish themselves ' : untev; 
 fd^eiben, instead of fc^eiben: cf. Werke, ii. 181. 'The dis- 
 tinctive marks of animals, e.g. are taken from the claws and 
 teeth : for in fact it is not merely cognition which by this 
 means distinguishes one animal from another : but the animal 
 thereby separates itself off: by these weapons it keeps itself to 
 itself and separate from the universal.' Cf. Werke, vii. a. 651 
 seqq. {Encycl. § 370) where reference is made to Cuvier, Re-. 
 cherches sur les ossements fossiles des quadrupides (18 12), &c. 
 
 P. 368, § 230. Kant, Kritik der Urtheilskraft : Einleitung, 
 § 9 (note), ( Werke, ed. Ros. iv. 39) ; see Caird's Critical Philo- 
 sophy of I. Kant, Book i. ch. 5 ; also Hegel's Werke, ii. 3. 
 
43© NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 P. 369, § 231. An example of Wolfs pedantry is given in 
 Hegel, Werke, v. 307, from Wolfs Rucuments of Architecture, 
 Theorem viii. ' A window must be broad enough for two persons 
 to recline c jmfortably in it, side by side. Proof. It is customary 
 to recline with another person on the window to look about. But 
 as the architect ought to satisfy the main views of the owner 
 (§ 1) he must make the window broad enough for two persons 
 to recline comfortably side by side.' 
 
 ' Construction ' : cf. Werke, ii. 38. ' Instead of its own internal 
 life and spontaneous movement, such a simple mode (as subject, 
 object, cause, substance, &c.) has expression given to it by per- 
 ception (here = sense-consciousness)' on some superficial analogy : 
 and this external and empty application of the formula is called 
 " Construction." The procedure shares the qualities of all such 
 formalism. How stupid-headed must be the man, who could 
 not in a quarter of an hour master the theory of asthenic, 
 sthenic and indirectly asthenic diseases ' (this is pointed at 
 Schelling's Werke, iii. 236) ' and the three corresponding cura- 
 tive methods, and who, when, no long time since, such in- 
 struction was sufficient, could not in this short period be trans- 
 formed from a mere practitioner into a " scientific" physician ? 
 The formalism of Naturfhilosophie may teach e. g. that under- 
 standing is electricity, or that the animal is nitrogen, or even 
 that it is like the South or the North, or that it represents it, — 
 as baldly as is here expressed or with greater elaboration in 
 terminology. At such teachings the inexperienced may fall 
 into a rapture of admiration, may reverence the profound 
 genius it implies, — may take delight in the sprightliness of 
 language which instead of the abstract concept gives the more 
 pleasing perceptual image, and may congratulate itself en 
 feeling its soul akin to such splendid achievement. The trick 
 of such a wisdom is as soon learnt as it is easy to practice ; its 
 repetition, when it grows familiar, becomes as intolerable as the 
 repetition of juggling once detected. The instrument of this 
 mono^^onoas formalism is not harder to manipulate than a 
 painter's palette with two colours on it, say red and green, the 
 former to dye the surface if q historic piece, the latter if a land- 
 scape is asked for.' 
 
 Kant ( Werke, iii. 36) in the * Prolegomena to every future 
 Metaphysic,' § 7, says : ' We find, however, it is the peculiarity 
 of mathematical science tiiat it must first exhibit its concept in a 
 
CHAPTER IX, §§ 231-244. 431 
 
 percept, and do so d priori, — hence in a pure percept. This 
 observation with regard to the nature of mathematics gives a 
 hint as to the first and supreme condition of its possibiHty : it 
 must be based on some pure percept in which it can exhibit all 
 its concepts in concreto and yet d, priori, or, as it is called, 
 construe them.' 
 
 The phrase, and the emphasis on the doctrine, that 'per- 
 ception must be taken as an auxiliary in mathematics,' belong 
 specially to the second edition of the Kritik, e.g. Pref. xii. To 
 learn the prop)erties of the isosceles triangle the mathematical 
 student must ' produce (by ' construction ') what he himself 
 thought into it and exhibited cL priori according to concepts.' 
 
 ' Construction, in general,' says Schelling ( Werke, v. 252 ; cf. 
 iv. 407) ' is the exhibition of the universal and particular in 
 unity': — 'absolute unity of the ideal and the real.' v. 225. 
 !Darfte((ung in intcneftueller Slnfdjauung ijl pt)i(ofoji^if(f>c Sonfiruftion. 
 
 P. 372. ' Recollection ' = (Srtnnerung : /. e. the return from 
 differentiation and externality to simplicity and inwardness: 
 distinguished from ®bdc^tni§ = memory (specially of words). 
 
 P. 373, § 236. Cf. Schelling, Werke, iv. 405. 'Every 
 particular object is in its absoluteness the Idea; and accordingly 
 the Idea is also the absolute object (©cgcnfianb) itself,— as the 
 absolutely ideal also the absolutely real.' 
 
 P. 374, § 236. Aristotle, Metaphys. xi. 9 (1074. 6. 34) avrov 
 apa voel (6 vovs ^dfos), ftTrep (<rr\ to KparitTTOv, Kai e(mv f} vnrjiris 
 voTjo-tcos poTjaii. Cf. Arist. Metaph. xii. 7. 
 
 P. 377, §239. ' Supposes a correlative '=ifi fur (liiieg. On ©ci)n; 
 fiir^gitug, cf. Werke, iii. 168. DaS 3bec((e ift not^twnbig fur^Sincg, 
 aber eg ifl nit^t fuv cin 9tiibercs : bag (Sine fiir hjefc^eg fg ift, ifi nur eg fclbfl. 
 . . . God is therefore for-self (to himself) in so far as he himself 
 is that which is for him. 
 
 P. 379, § 244. The percipient idea (anfc^auenbe 3bee), of 
 course both object and subject of intuition, is opposed to the 
 Idea (as logical) in the element of Thought: but still as Idea 
 and not— to use Kant's phrase {Kritik der r. Vern. § 26)-:-as 
 natura materialiter spectata. 
 
INDEX 
 
 A. 
 
 Absolute (the), 19, 50, 410 ; re- 
 lation to God, 156; absolute 
 idea, 374 (cf- 43i); definitions 
 of, 156, 161, 185, 206, 213, 
 288, 314. 352- 
 Abstract (and concrete), 295, 301. 
 Abstraction, 293. 
 Accidents (of substance), 273 seqq. 
 Activity (bringing condition to 
 
 fact), 267. . 
 
 Actuality, 257 se^q. ; its relations 
 
 to reason, 10, 258, 383. 
 Affinity (in chemism), 341. 
 Agnosticism, 250. 
 All (quasi-universal), 308. 
 Alteration, 172. 
 
 Analogy, 324 ^^^9- ^ ^ 
 
 Analysis, 79; its dangers, Ko, 
 
 398 ; analytical method, 365. 
 Animals and men, 4, 47. 
 Anselm, 140, 331 se^g. (cf. 427). 
 Anthropomorphism, 122. 
 Antinomies (of reason), 97, 99, 
 
 189. 
 Apodictic judgment, 313. 
 Appearance, 93, 239 segq. 
 Apperception (pure), 88, 400. 
 Appetite, 345. 
 A priori {the), 83. 
 Aristotle, his idealism, 15, 75. 
 359, 364 ; as a logician, 39 
 seqq., 318, 32a; on the dignity 
 of philosophy, 45 ; compared 
 ■vrith Plato, 359 ; on the Idea, 
 374 ; on life, 345, 359- 
 Arithmetic (logic of), 163. 
 
 VOL. II 
 
 Art, 146. 
 
 Assertory judgments, 312. 
 
 Atheism, what it implies, 135; 
 charged against Spinoza, 105, 
 275. 
 
 Atomic philosophy, 182. 
 
 Atoms, 193. . . 
 
 Attraction (as constructive prin- 
 ciple), 181. 
 
 Attribution (of predicates), 63, 
 298. 
 
 y4w/%<f*f«, explained, 180. 
 
 Axioms (mathematical), 323. 
 
 Becoming, 163. 
 
 Beginning, what it implies, 166. 
 Being (doctrine of), 156 segq.; 
 being and nothing, 161 ; con- 
 trasted with thought, 103, 107 
 segg.; determinate being, 167 
 segg. ; being in or by self, 171 ; 
 being- for-self, 176 segg. 
 
 Body (and soul), 360. 
 
 Boethius, 402. 
 
 Buddhist metaphysics, 161, 163, 
 411. 
 
 C. 
 
 Caput Mortuum, 400. 
 
 Cartesianism, 127. 
 
 Categorical judgment, 310; syl- 
 logism, 327. 
 
 Categories (the), 50, 57, 3991 
 their finitude, 58, lai ; criticism 
 of, 91. 
 
 Cause and effect, 276; efficient 
 and final, 828, 344. 
 
 Ff 
 
434 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Chance, 263 seqq. 
 
 Chaos, 237, 
 
 Chemism, 341 seqq. ; chemical 
 
 principles, 235, 419. 
 Christianity, a religion of reason, 
 
 74; its faith, 125; religion of 
 
 consolation, 270 ; of personality, 
 
 293 ; its philosophical precept, 
 
 25X. 
 Cognition, as analysed by Kant, 
 
 86 seqq. ; its nature and methods, 
 
 362. 
 Coleridge, 401, 410. 
 Common sense, 126, 
 Comparison, 216. 
 Conceivable (the), 260. 
 Concept : see Notion. 
 Conception ( = Representation) , 
 
 37; preliminary to thought, i. 
 Condition, 266. 
 Conditioned (the), 121. 
 Conscience (rights of), 44, 388. 
 Consciousness (appeal to), 134. 
 Consensus gentium, 134, 408. 
 Consolation (Christian), 269. 
 Construction (method of), 368 
 
 (cf. 430). 
 Content (and form), 24a seqq. 
 Contingency, 263. 
 Continuous quantity, 188. 
 Contradiction (principle of), 221 
 
 seqq., 356, 418. 
 Contrariety, 223. 
 
 Conviction (right of): see Con- 
 science. 
 Copula (of a judgment), 298 seqq. 
 Correctness (and truth), 304 seqq., 
 
 352. 
 Correlation, 245. 
 Cosmology, 70 ; cosmological 
 
 proof, 102. 
 Critical philosophy, its thesis, 
 
 17, 43 ; examined at length, 82 
 
 seqq. 
 
 D. 
 
 Deduction of categories, 87, 399 
 
 seqq. 
 Definiteness, its value, 1 70. 
 Definition, 366; criterion of, 186. 
 Degree, 192. 
 Deism, 72, 135, 136, aio. 
 
 Demonstration, 368 seqq. 
 
 Descartes, 127 seqq., 33a; com- 
 pared with Jacobi, 139. 
 
 Design (argument from), 347 (cf. 
 424). 
 
 Destiny, 269. 
 
 Determinate being, 169. 
 
 Development, 288 seqq. ; in rela- 
 tion to innate ideas, 130. 
 
 Dialectic, innate in thought, 18; 
 its operation explained, I47 
 seqq. ; in Plato and Kant, 149 
 (cf. 409) ; in Aristotle, 409 ; dis- 
 tinguished from Scepticism, 151 ; 
 and from Reflection, 147. 
 
 Difference, 215. 
 
 Discrete quantity, 189. 
 
 Disjunctive judgment, 311 ; syl- 
 logism, 337. 
 
 Diversity, 216. 
 
 Division (logical), 367 (cf. 429). 
 
 Dogmatic philosophy, 60, 66. 
 
 Dualism in theology, 72 ; in philo- 
 sophy, 113. 
 
 E. 
 
 Eden (Garden of), 54 seqq. 
 Education, its office, 100 ; mistake 
 
 in, 338- 
 
 Effect (and Cause), 276 seqq. 
 
 Ego (the absolute), 393. 
 
 Eleatic philosophy, 159 seqq., 198. 
 
 ' Elements ' of logic, 329. 
 
 Eniboitement, 289, 425. 
 
 Empiricism, 14, 76 seqq. ; its rela- 
 tive value, 77. 
 
 Encyclopaedia of science, 25 ; of 
 philosophy, 38. 
 
 End ( = final cause), 113, 343 seqq. 
 
 Essence (opposed to Being), 302 
 seqq. 
 
 Eudaemonism (before Kant), iii, 
 
 403- . , 
 
 Evil (Good and), 71 ; origm of, 
 
 54- 
 Evolution, old technical sense, 
 
 424. 
 Existence, 229 seqq. 
 Experience, principle of, 12, 31, 
 
 384; elements in, 81. 
 Explanation (limits of), 355. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 435 
 
 F. 
 
 Faculties (in psycholog)-), 338. 
 Faith, as philosophic principle, 
 
 124 seqq. 
 Fall of man, interpreted, 54. 
 Fate, 269. 
 Feeling, as cognitive form, 136, 
 
 408. 
 Fichte, deduction of categories, 87, 
 
 387, 399 ; the Atistoss, 119, 405 ; 
 
 Sonnenklarer BcHcht, 241 ; 
 
 characteristics of, 176, 373 ; on 
 
 the Object, 334; the Ego, 393. 
 Figures of syllogism, 321. 
 Final cause, 343 j^^^., 419. 
 Finite (and infinite), 100, 173. 
 Force, 246 seqq. 
 Form (and content), 6, 242 seqq. ; 
 
 form of thought, 48 ; form and 
 
 matter, 236. 
 Fortuitous (the), 264. 
 Freedom, 44, 50, 283 ; as cha- 
 racter of all thought, 19, 118; 
 
 as Nihilism, 162; of will, 264. 
 
 Generality, 309. 
 
 Genius (defined by Kant), 113. 
 
 Geometrical method, 369. 
 
 Glaube, ^01, 407. 
 
 God, logical definition of, 156, 
 161, 206 ; how knowable, 65, 
 74, 125 ; proofs of his being ex- 
 amined, 6, 20, 72, 74, lo^seqq., 
 115, 346; as activity, 69, 396; 
 as spirit, 107, 137; as creator, 
 337, 294; as force, 247, 250; 
 as trinity, 187, 262, 311; as ab- 
 solute cunning, 350; not jealous, 
 254; his goodness, 145, 240; 
 his power, 150,210; his names, 
 64, 395- 
 
 Goethe, 53, 80 (cf. 398), 145 (cf. 
 409), 253 (cf. 421), 256 (cf. 
 422), 400, 423. 
 
 Good (the), 71, 114. 
 
 Greek philosophers, 35 ; gods, 
 293- 
 
 Grenze and Schranke, 413. 
 
 Ground (and consequent), 224 j^^^. 
 
 H. 
 
 Haller (A. v.), quoted, 196, 352, 
 416. 
 
 Have (and be), 333, 298. 
 
 Heraclitus (and the Eleatics), 168, 
 412. 
 
 Herder, 347 (cf. 420). 
 
 History, pragmatic, 256 (cf. 433) ; 
 psychological, ib. ; history of 
 philosophy, 159. 
 
 Hume (on ideas of necessity), 82, 
 96, no. 
 
 Hypothetical judgment, 311; syl- 
 logism, 327. 
 
 I. 
 
 I (Ego), its universality, 38, 48 ; 
 
 source of the categories, 88 ; 
 
 as self- reference, 179 ; 1 = 1, 158, 
 
 410. 
 Idea (the), 92, 352 seqq. ; aesthetic 
 
 ideas, 113; innate ideas, 130; 
 
 clear and distinct, 296, 426. 
 Ideal, II ; of reason, 102. 
 Idealism, subjective, 90, 94; ab- 
 solute, 67, 386. 
 Ideality (of the finite), 178, 413. 
 Identity, philosophy of, 194, 219; 
 
 its meaning, 211; law of, 313. 
 Imagination (in Spinoza), 196, 
 
 415 ; in Kant, 399. 
 Immediacy (and mediation), 30 ; 
 
 immediate knowledge, 53, 129 
 
 seqq. 
 Indifference (absolute), 158, 161. 
 Individuality, 291 seqq. 
 Induction, 324, 427. 
 Infinite (and finite), 62 ; wrong 
 
 infinite, 174; infinite progress, 
 
 175,194,415. 
 Innate ideas, 1 30. 
 Intuition (and thought), 121, 386, 
 
 408. 
 Inward (and outward), 252 seqq. 
 
 J. 
 
 Jacobi (F. H.), 401, 406 seqq. ; 
 against demonstration, 105; 
 agnostic, 121 seqq.; on cause, 
 377 (cf. 423)- 
 
436 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Judaism, 210, 275. 
 
 Judgment, defined, 297 ; classi- 
 fication of, 303 seqq. (cf. 426) ; 
 Kant's criticism of the faculty, 
 
 K. 
 
 Kant: his standpoint, 17, 83; his 
 doctrine of categories, 83 seqq. ; 
 examination of his system, 81 
 seqq. ; theory of matter, 182 ; on 
 'construction' in mathematics, 
 369 (cf. 430) ; on teleology, 343 ; 
 on modality, 260; his ethics, 
 110, 372; defects of his system, 
 
 "9. 372,387,399- 
 Kastner (A. G,), 184, 414. 
 Kind (genus), 361. 
 Knowledge, 94; immediate, 123. 
 
 Lalande, 123, 407. 
 
 Law (of thought), 213 seqq. (cf. 
 417), 290; of a phenomenon, 242. 
 
 Leibniz : maxim of indiscernibles, 
 317 (cf. 417) ; of sufficient rea- 
 son, 327 (cf. 418); on final 
 cause, 228 (cf. 419); his mo- 
 nadology, 275, 334 (cf. 428). 
 
 Life (as a logical category), 358 
 seqq. ; example of becoming, 168. 
 
 Like (and unlike), 218. 
 
 Limit (barrier), 172. 
 
 Locke (as empiricist), 365. 
 
 Logic, defined, 30; its utility, 31, 
 34, 40 ; in Aristotle, 39 ; ap- 
 plied, 50 ; subdivided, 155 ; 
 formal, 214, 226, 288, 316. 
 
 M. 
 
 Magnitude, 185 ; intensive, 192, 
 415- 
 
 Man (as an universal), 293. 
 
 Many (and one), 181. 
 
 Marks (in concept), 296. 
 
 Materialism (as logical result of 
 empiricism), 81, 118; of a 
 mathematical system, 187. 
 
 Mathematics: place in science, 
 187 seqq.] mathematical syl- 
 logism, 323. 
 
 Matter (and form), 123, 235. 
 
 Mean ( = middle term), 318 seqq. 
 
 Means (and end), 347 seqq. 
 
 Measure (logical category), 199 
 seqq. ; its antinomy, 202. 
 
 Mechanism, 336 seqq. ; in ethics 
 and politics, 340. 
 
 Mediation (and immediacy), 133 
 seqq. 
 
 Memory (mechanical), 338. 
 
 Metaphysics, as logic, 45 ; pre- 
 Kantian, 61 ; pseudo-metaphy- 
 sics in science, 184; categories, 
 
 312. 
 
 Methods : different, 53 ; metaphy- 
 sical, 61, 75 ; analytic, 365 ; 
 synthetic, 366 ; speculative, 375; 
 methodology, 328. 
 
 Middle (law of excluded), 220; 
 middle term, 318 seqq. 
 
 Mind (and nature), 70 seqq,, 180, 
 188, 414. 
 
 Modality, 260. 
 
 Mohammedanism, 210, 275. 
 
 Monads, 334, 428. 
 
 Moods (of syllogism), 334, 
 
 Mysticism, 154, 410; mystic num- 
 bers, 198. 
 
 Nature (philosophy of), 50, 326, 
 394; and spirit, 180, 188, 263 
 ■^cq^-t 377, 4'4» 431 ; nature and 
 the logical idea, 379. 
 
 Natural (or physico-) theology, 
 163 seqq., 402. 
 
 Naturalism, 118. 
 
 Necessity (and freedom), 71, 100, 
 282; and universality, 12, 15, 
 82 ; its nature analysed, 367 
 seqq. 
 
 Necessitarian, no. 
 
 Negation, 171, 219. 
 
 Nemesis (measure as), 201. 
 
 Neutralisation, 342. 
 
 Newton, 13, 183, 250, 414, 421. 
 
 Nicolaus Cusanus, 410. 
 
 Nodal lines, 204. 
 
 Nothing (and being), 161. 
 
 Notion: contrast^l with being, 
 102, 331 ; theory of, 286 seqq. ; 
 
INDEX. 
 
 437 
 
 classifications of, 296 ; opposed 
 to representative concept, 3, 16, 
 165. 
 
 Novalis, quoted, 393. 
 
 Number, 1 90 seqq. 
 
 Object (andsubject),329J<r^^. ; ob- 
 jective (and subjective), 83 seqq. ; 
 objective thought, 45, 57, 145. 
 
 Oken, quoted, 392,401, 418. 
 
 One (and many), 1 79 seqq. 
 
 Ontology, 67; ontological proof 
 in theology, 107, 331. 
 
 Opposition (logical), 221. 
 
 Organism, 246, 281, 360 seqq. 
 
 Oriental theosophy, 64. 
 
 Ought (the), II, 115, 372. 
 
 Outward (and inward), 25a. 
 
 Positive (and negative), 219 seqq. ; 
 
 positive element in Science, 
 
 26. 
 Possibility, 259. 
 Practical Reason, no, 403. 
 Predication, 300 seqq. 
 Preformation, 289, 425. 
 Problematical judgment, 313. 
 Proclus, 386. 
 
 Progress : its meaning, 169. 
 Properties (of a thing), 233. 
 Proposition, 65, 300, 395. 
 Protagoras, 149 (cf. 409). 
 Proverbs quoted, 150. 
 Providence, 268. 
 Psychology, 6Sseqq., 95 seqq.jiiS 
 
 (cf. 428). 
 Punctum Saliens, 426. 
 Pure thought, 30, 49. 
 Pythagoras, 197, 416. 
 
 P. 
 
 Pantheism, 72 ; in Spinoza, 105, 
 275 ; its principle, 167. 
 
 Paralogism (in rational psycho- 
 logy). 95. 97- 
 
 Parmenides, 160, 411. 
 
 Particular, 291 seqq. 
 
 Parts (and whole), 245 ; distinct 
 from organs, 246. 
 
 Personality, 124, 274. 
 
 Phenomenalism (Kant's), 93, 240. 
 
 Phenomenology of Spirit : place in 
 Hegel's system, 58. 
 
 Philosophy : general definition, 4 ; 
 its scope and aim, 28, 38, 44, 
 73. 127. 164, 262, 354, 376, 
 391 ; history of, 22, 159, 385, 
 411 ; in England, 1 2 ; rise of, 
 18; its branches, 28, 322; me- 
 thod of, 375 ; philosophy and 
 life, 384, 393. 
 
 Physicists, 193. 
 
 Plato : reminiscence of ideas, 1 30, 
 289; his dialectic, 149; on the 
 Other, 173; Philebus, 177; com- 
 pared with Aristotle, 259. 
 
 Pneumatology, 68 seqq. 
 
 Polarity, 231 (cf. 418). 
 
 Porosity, 258. 
 
 Qualitative judgment, 304; syl- 
 logism, 317. 
 Quality, 158 seqq.., 170. 
 Quantity, 185. 
 Quantum, 190. 
 
 R. 
 
 Raisonnement, 229. 
 Ratio (quantitative), 199. 
 Reality : opposed to negation, 171; 
 
 to ideality, 1 80. 
 Reason : faculty of the imcondi- 
 
 tioned, 92, 400 seqq. ; as merely 
 
 critical, 109; practical, no; 
 
 negative, 152 seqq.; as syllogism, 
 
 314- 
 Reciprocity, 379. 
 Reflection, 5, 8, 41, 53, 308, 375 ; 
 
 distinct from dialectic, 147 ; 
 
 judgments of, 307. 
 Reinhold : his method, 17, 385. 
 Religion (and philosophy), 3, 43,, 
 
 64; its nature, 133 seqq. 
 Reminiscence (Platonic), 130, 389. 
 Repulsion, 181. 
 Roman religion, 335. 
 Rousseau, 293. 
 Rule, 202. 
 
438 
 
 INDEX, 
 
 S. 
 
 Scepticism : ancient, 53 ; opposed 
 to dogmatism, 66 ; modem, 82 ; 
 its function in philosophy, 141, 
 
 151. 
 
 Schellmg, 46 (cf. 392,. 393), 367 
 (cf. 429). 
 
 Schiller, 1 12 (cf. 405). 
 
 Scholasticism, 40, 66, 75, 80 ; de- 
 finition of God, 69. 
 
 Schopenhauer, 401, 408, 424. 
 
 Sciences and philosophy, 19, 22 ; 
 science and religion, 250. 
 
 Scotch philosophers, 131. 
 
 Scotus Erigena, 387. 
 
 Self-determination, iii. 
 
 Self-identity, 212. 
 
 Sensation, 36 seqq. 
 
 Sensus eminentior, 73, 397. 
 
 Sex, 361. 
 
 Sin (original), 55. 
 
 Slavery (abolition of), 293. 
 
 Socrates, his dialectic, 149, 228. 
 
 Solon, 43. 
 
 Somewhat, 171. 
 
 Sophists : theory of education, 
 131 ; essence of sophistry, 148, 
 228; opposed to Socrates, 149, 
 419. 
 
 Sontes, 203, 417. 
 
 Soul : as object of psychology, 69, 
 77 ; (rationalist theory of,) cri- 
 ticised by Kant, 96 ; soul and 
 Spirit, 69. 
 
 Speculation, i6 ; as opposed to 
 dogmatism, 67 ; speculative rea- 
 son, 152 seqq. 
 
 Spinoza, his alleged atheism and 
 pantheism, 105 seqq., 375; causa 
 siii, 139, 277; his God, 159, 
 402 ; on determination, 171 ; 
 amor intellectualis , 283 (cf. 
 424); on imagination, 196 (cf. 
 415); his method, 367 j^^j'. (cf. 
 429). 
 
 Spirit, see Mtnd. 
 
 State (mechanical theories of the), 
 182, 340. 
 
 Subject (and predicate), 301, 395, 
 428. 
 
 Subjective (and objective), 85, 
 270. 
 
 Substance, 273 seqq. 
 
 Sufficient Reason (principle of), 
 224 seqq. (cf. 418). 
 
 Syllogism, 314 seqq. ; as a uni- 
 versal form of things, 314 ; in 
 mechanism, 340 ; in teleology, 
 
 348- 
 Synthetic method, 366. 
 System (in philosophy), 23 seqq., 
 
 159- 
 
 Taste, defined by Kant, 113. 
 
 Teleology, 343 seqq. 
 
 Terms (of syllogism), 317. 
 
 Theology (natural), 71 seqq., lor 
 ^eqq., 397- 
 
 Theorem, 368. 
 
 Theoretical Reason (Kant on), 86 
 seqq. 
 
 Thing, 69, 233 ; thing in or by it- 
 self, 91, 231. 
 
 Thought, its meaning and activity, 
 35 seqq. ; subjective, 36 ; ob- 
 jective, 45, 47 ; distinguished 
 from pictorial representation, 3, 
 
 37- 
 
 Transcendent, 89 ; transcendental, 
 87, 400. 
 
 Truth, object of philosophy, 3; and 
 of logic, 32 ; its meaning, 51, 
 387 ; distinguished from correct- 
 ness, 305, 352, 354. 
 
 U. 
 
 Unconditioned (the), 92, 410. 
 
 Understanding, as faculty of the 
 conditioned, 58, 92 ; as a prin- 
 ciple of limitation, 143 seqq., 
 400. 
 
 Unessential, 211. 
 
 Universal (the), 35, 42, 143 ; ' mo- 
 ment 'of the notion, 291 seqq.; 
 universality and necessity, 12, 
 16,82. 
 
 Untrue, 245. 
 
 Urtheil, 297. 
 
 Utilitarianism in Science, 346. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 439 
 
 V. 
 
 Variety, 215. 
 
 Verstand and Vemunft, 400 seqq. 
 
 Volition, 364, 371 seqq. 
 
 W. 
 JVesen, 209. 
 Whole (and parts), 245. 
 
 Will, 371 ; as practical reason, 
 110; its freedom, 264. 
 
 Wolff (Christian), his philosophy, 
 60 seqq., 395, 396 ; method, 
 369- 
 
 World (the), as object of Cos- 
 mology, 97. 
 
 Z. 
 Zeno (of Elea), 169, 195,415. 
 
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