Chapter 16

[3]The use of the substantival formBeingfor the verbal (participle, infinitive, or indicative) suggests an idea of permanence and substance, or essence. So potentiality seems much more real thanmayorcan.And yet the phrase He knows δυνάμει is only equivalent to He can or may know (δύναται or ἐνδέχεται).

[4]When it is said that: 'It is strange that so profound a thinker as Hegel should not have seen that the conception of definite objects, such as adogandcat, is prior no less in nature than in knowledge to the conception of abstract relations, such asisandis not,'it is difficult to say what the writer meant. Had he ever heard of geometry? Both in nature and in knowledge (i. e. in the natural process from sense to thought) chairs and tables are prior to lines and surface. The mathematical point and line are abstractions, i. e. thoughts, and no image of sensuous reality. It is also true that the ordinary conception of the sun's movements was 'prior no less in nature than in knowledge' to the theory of the earth's rotation. And no doubt Hegel, sedate though his boyhood was, had made the acquaintance of dog and cat in his pre-logical days: as of balls and windows before he was turned upon Euclid. See Mansel'sLetters,Lectures, &c., p. 209.

[5]AsBeingto ordinary unthinkingness seems to mean a great deal it cannot expound, so the mind full of the mystic depths of time and space is disgusted to find them turn so empty and shallow when it would set forth its wealth. See Augustin.Confess.xi. 14.

[6]This may be illustrated by saying that toaffirmis the same energy of thought as todeny,and that the difference lies in the terms related by the judgment.In themselves,the one act is as empty or meaningless as the other.

[7]Heine,Ueber Deutschland (Werke),v. 213.

[8]πᾱσα οὐσία δοκεῑ τόδε τι σημαίνειν (Ar.Cat.5).

[9]Hence the disparaging sense in which the term 'individual' may be used.

[10]These latter terms being used in a metaphorical sense.

[11]νόμῳ γλυκὺ καὶ νόμῳ πικρόν ἐτεῇ δὲ ἃτομα καὶ κενόν. Democritus ap. Sext.Empir. adv. Math.vii. 135.

[12]Aristotle's μᾱλλον καὶ ἦττον: seeMetaph.i. 6 τὺ μέγα κaὶ τὸ μικρον.

[13]Thus, the sharp break at death suggests the reference of vital phenomena to a substantial soul.

The coherence and consistency of being was, it appeared in the last chapter, only to be maintained by assuming it to fall into two planes, or orders, always however relative to each other. The need of a measure forced itself upon even the superficial student. In the ordinary business of economical life one commodity of common use or of general acceptability steps into the place of a common measure. At first it is no more than one amongst many, a more suitable and convenient means of discharging the task of mensuration. But gradually it draws away into a world of its own, and acquires in common estimation a unique and peculiar dignity. It becomes a commodity of a higher order than the common, and is even treated as if it had intrinsic and inherent worth, apart from all relations of exchange. In a further stage it rises to rank as an invariable and almost supersensible standard, which amid all the fluctuations of currency tends to remain unchanged. One loses sight of the movement out of which it grew and in which it exists—the social give and take, the interaction of individual needs and general opinion.

The characteristic feature of this sphere of thought is the perpetual antithesis of terms. And its tragedy isthe result of the tendency to separate the terms, and treat them as independently real. It matters not how often this error may be detected. Each side of the antithesis no doubt reflects itself upon the other. But we as constantly fail to note that reflection. Even the philosopher who most loudly preaches relativity falls into the common trap, and speaks of relatives as ultimate and absolute. He talks of an Unknowable, as if it could be without a Known (or Knowable): whereas no such term fully manifests itself. Each term owes its distinct existence to its correlative: each gives itself over to the other, and invests it with meaning and authority. Accordingly when even the ordinary mind, which takes these categories as they are given, is asked what each means, it can only reply by referring to the other. A cause isthatwhich has an effect. The dialectic in the nature of thought,—its self-revising self-conscious nature—which was concealed in the First Part of Logic, where one term, when carried to its extreme, passed over into another, is made obvious in the Second Part, where each term postulates and even points to its correlative, and, however it may be contra-distinguished, cannot be thought without it. Thus, force is a meaningless abstraction without the correlative expression or utterance of force: and matter means nothing except in its distinction from, and yet reflection on, form. These, it may be said, are simple and tautological statements. They are principles, however, which every day sees disregarded. Have they, for example, been remembered by those theorists who tell us that everything is ultimately reducible to matter, or who propose to improve upon that theory by explaining that matter is after all only another name for force? Forgetting how this reduction is made, they are dealing with abstractions or mental figments, and losing theirway in an endless maze of metaphysics. Do those who speak so confidently of laws of nature as something real and effective ever reflect that the two terms are more or less relative to each other, and that there is some latent metaphor in the phrase? Or if they prefer to speak of laws of phenomena, on which word is the accent to be laid? Those who thus speak of matter and force, really speak of a matter which is formed and form-possessed, capable of determining its own form, and of a force which can rule its own exertions: and for such conceptions the words in question are scarcely adequate representatives. They use the language of the Second, to express notions which properly belong to the Third branch of Logic.

The whole range of Essence or Relativity exhibits a sort of see-saw: while one term goes up in importance, the other term goes down. The several antitheses, too, have their day of fashion, and give place to others. Those inquirers who speak of the phenomena of nature shrug their shoulders at the very mention of essences: and the practical man, whose field is actuality, acquires a very pronounced contempt for both abstractions. One class of investigators glories in the perpetual discovery of differences, and stigmatises the seekers after identity and similarity as dreamers: while the latter retort, and name the specialisers empiricists. One intellect considers an action almost solely by its grounds or motives: another almost solely by its consequences. Some console themselves for their degradation by piquing themselves on what they might have been: others despise these 'would-be' minds for what they practically are. What a wealth there lies in each of us, which our nearest friends know nothing of, and which has never been made outward! But in this mode of thought, it is the persistentdelusion, misleading science no less than metaphysics and the reflective thinking of ordinary life, to suppose that either of two relative terms has an existence and value of its own. In Germany paper-money is sometimes known as 'Schein' or Show. That term marks its relativity to the gold or silver currency of the realm: and it would be as absurd to pay with Austrian paper-money in Persia, as to take one term of Essence apart from its correlative. The disputes about essences, about matters and forces, about substance, about freedom and necessity, or cause and effect, are generally aggravated by a forced abstraction of one term from another on which its meaning and existence depend.

The essence may be roughly defined as that measure or standard which corresponds to the variation of immediate being, and yet remains identical in all variation. Or, if we like, we may say that this immediate being, which, as derivative, may now be called existence[1], has its ground in the essence. The essence is the ground of existence: and essence which exists is a 'thing,' Such an existing essence or thing subsists in its properties; and these properties are only found in the thing. Thus the essence, when it comes into existence as a thing, turns out to be a mere phenomenon or appearance.—Such briefly stated is the development of essence proper into appearance.

With the idea of essential being—a permanent which yet changes, there emerge the problems connected with the double aspect of relation as identity and difference,—the favourite categories of reflection. These terms indeed the popular logician would fain avoid as savouring of pedantic accuracy, and prefers the psychological titles of similarity and contrast.These, he tends to insinuate, are unique experiences, direct feelings, beyond which it is impossible to go in analysis. The logician, on the other hand, must insist on dealing with the more radical phase of the terms. And he must note their essential interdependence and their intrinsic contradictoriness. Abstract sameness, or sameness which does not presuppose a tinge of difference, is a fiction of weak thought, which wishes to simplify the subtlety of nature. Identity is a relative term, and for that very reason presupposes difference: and for the same reason difference presupposes identity and is meaningless without it. The whole dispute about 'Personal Identity,' as it descends from one English psychologist to another, is enveloped in the obscurity which springs from failure to grasp the logical antinomy on which the question turns. When I feel that my friend whom I have not met for years is still the same, should I take the trouble to express myself in this manner, unless with reference to the difference betwixt Then and Now? If I remark that two men are different, would the remark be worth making or hearing unless there was some identity which made that difference all the more striking? The essence is, in short, the unity of sameness and difference: and when so apprehended, it is the ground by which we explain existence. The essence, ground, or possibility, is at once itself and not itself: if it is self-identical, it is for the same reason self-distinguishing. If it is to be itself, it can only be so by negativing what in it is other than itself. The affirmation of self implies the negation of the other of self,—the redintegration (though not the blank absorption) of the other in it. This is thecruxwhich lies inEx nihilo nihil fit:what exists must not be other than the essence (the effect not more than the cause),and yet unless it is other and different, there has been no passage from essence to existence.

The tendency to identify, and the tendency to distinguish, alternate both in scientific thought and in general culture. But whichever prevail for the moment, it is only as a re-action and a protest against the one-sided predominance of the other. And thus both ultimately rest upon and presuppose a ground of existence which is neither mere sameness nor mere difference. It is only when the two tendencies meet and interpenetrate that science accomplishes its end, and discovers the ground of existence. In the first instance the world presents to incipient science the aspect of mere identity and of mere difference. Likeness is confounded with sameness, and unlikeness with diversity. The popular and the infant minds do not draw fine distinctions. Things to them are either the same or different: one point of sameness may in certain conditions obliterate whole breadths of difference; and tiny divergence may make as nothing all the many points of agreement, purely and simply, i. e. abstractly. But the process of comparison, setting things beside each other, teaches us to refine a little, and speak of things as Like or Unlike. One thing is like another when the element of identity preponderates: it is unlike, when the difference is uppermost. Thus while we distinguish things from one another, we connect them. From mere variety, and mere sameness, we have risen, secondly, to distinctions of like and unlike. But, thirdly, this distinction of same and different is in the thing itself. Everything includes an antithesis or contradiction in it: it is at once positive and negative. One can only be virtuous, so long as one is not utterly virtuous.[2]To be a philosopher, implies that you arenot wholly or merely a philosopher. The rational animal is so, because of an inherent irrationality, and is so, only as rising upon and superseding it. Every epithet, so to speak, by which you describe any reality, presupposes in it the negative of the quality. Not only does every negation presuppose an attempted or surmised affirmation, but an affirmation is always, it may be said, a re-affirmation against an incipient doubt. Every stage of reality involves the presence of antithetical but inseparable elements: every light implies a shadow to set it forth. The epithet of each real is onlya potiori.While it retains itself, it must lose itself. Its positivity is only secured by its self-negation and its identity is based upon its self-distinction. Every proposition which conveys real knowledge is a statement that self-sameness is combined with difference. Every such proposition is synthetical: it unites or identifies what is supposed to be implicitly different, or differentiates what seemed only identical. Here we have thatcoincidentia oppositorum,which is the truth of essence. Thus, e. g. the essence of the Self is the contradiction between its self-centred unity and its existence by self-differentiation into elements.

Essence, thus comprehended as the unity of identity and difference, as that which is and is not the same, is the Ground, from which an Existence comes as the Consequent. Or, otherwise expressed, the ground is the source of the differences,—the point where they converge into unity, and whence they diverge into existence. Everything in existence has such a ground: or, as it is somewhat tautologically stated in the common formula, a sufficient ground. On that account, it is no great matter to give reasons or grounds for a thing, andno amount of them can render a thing either right or wrong, unless in reference to some given and supposedly fixed point. For the ground only states the same thing over again in a mediate or reflected form. It carries back the actual fact to its antecedent: and thus deprives it of its abruptness or inexplicability, by showing you it was there implicitly; and therefore as you accepted the ground you cannot complain of what but serves to continue it. To refer to the ground is to say there is really nothing new: and as you raised no objection before, you need raise none now.

The Existent world—a world of existents, each conditioning and conditioned—is popularly described as a world of Things. These Things are the solid hinges on which turns our ordinary conception of change and action. They act, and exhibit properties. Being is partly substantive, partly adjective. The Thing itself is the ground of its properties: i. e. each thing is looked upon as a unity in which different relations converge, or an identity which subsists through its changing states. This is the side emphasised in ordinary life, when a thing is regarded as the permanent and enduring subject, which has certain properties. But a little science or a little reflection soon turns the tables upon the thing, and shows that the properties are independent matters, which, temporarily it may be, converge or combine into a factitious unity which we term a thing. But these very matters cannot be independent or whole, just because they interpenetrate each other in the thing. The thing, which from one point of view seemed permanent, and the properties, which from another point of view seemed self-subsistent matters, are neither of them more than appearance. For they must be at one, and at one they cannot be. And if we reduce the various matters to one, and speakof Matter in general, we have a mere abstraction—a something which only becomes real by being stamped with a special form.MereMatter likemereThing (thing in itself) is a knowable Unknowable.

In this way we pass from the talk about essence, things, and matter into an other range of the sphere of relativity. We no longer have one order of being behind or in the depth, and another referring back to it. We now speak (as Mill does) of Phenomena:—not phenomena of an unknown, but, simply disregarding the background, we find all we want upon the surface. For neither is thing more real than property, nor essence than existence. Each is exactly equal in reality to the other, and that reality is its relation to the other. The thing and the essence with their claim to truth disappear. Nothing truly is: but only appears to be. The semblance (Schein) may refer to an essential. But the appearance (Erscheinung) only refers to another appearance, and so on. The phenomenal world is all on one level:—as was the world of immediate being. But, there, each term of being presented itself as independent: here, nothing is independent—nothing ever reallyis,but only represents something else, which is in its turn representative. Yet even here there is a pretence of hierarchy in existence. In the phenomenon a certain superiority is attributed to its Law. But the conception of Law is hard to keep in its proper place. Either it assumes a permanency—even were it but a permanent possibility—as contrasted with the coming and passing phenomenon: and then it is apt to be confounded with a real Essence. Or, on the other hand, it comes to be looked on as a mere way of colligating phenomena,—as a mere appearance in the variety of appearance (as it were an iris in the rain-drops)—a phenomenon of a phenomenon. Sucha distinction between the phenomenon and its law; therefore, is and must be illusory, or itself only an appearance. As such it is described as the difference of Form and Content: two terms, which are incessantly opposed, but which more than most antitheses reveal when pressed the hollowness of their opposition. For true or developed Form is Content, andvice versa.

Instead however of this practical identification of the law of the phenomenon with the duly-formulated phenomenon itself, it is more natural to emphasise the discordance of the two aspects of reality, and yet to acknowledge their essential relativity. This essential relativity in the phenomenon has a threefold aspect: the relation of whole and parts; of force and the exertion of force; of inward and outward. The relation of whole and parts tends to explain by statical composition: the relation of force and its exertion, by dynamical construction. According to the former the parts are constituted by their dependence upon and in the whole, and yet the whole is composed by the addition of the several parts together. Each extreme is what it is only through the other. Only those parts can make up a whole, which somehow have the whole in them: and to become the whole, they must contrive to wholly obliterate their partitional character. A better exhibition of the inner unity and the difference between form and contents is seen in the relation of a force to its exertion. Here the contents appear under a double form: first, under the form of mere identity, as force,—secondly, under the form of mere distinction, as the manifestation of that force. Yet a force is only such in its utterance or manifestation, while in that utterance, if abstracted from the force it carries forth, all energy has been superseded. This separation of content and form, or of content as developed in two forms, appearsstill more clearly in the third relation: that of outward and inward. This is a popular distinction of very wide application in reference to phenomena. But neither outside nor inside is anything apart from its correlative. If the elements implied in the conception of phenomena are to have full justice done them, it must be expanded so as to give expression to these two phases, to include the outward and the inward. But at first only by reverting to something like the old distinction of essence and existence,—an essence however which is existent or phenomenal, and an existence which stands independent, though in correlation. Such being is Actuality—being, i. e. which is what it must be, and must be what it is.

Actuality, though it comes under the general head of Essence, tends to pass away into another sphere. Here, as elsewhere, we see that the general rubric of a sphere is only partially applicable to some of its subordinate sections. In essence proper there were, or were assumed to be, two grades of being—a real or essential, and an unessential or seeming: or being was regarded (contradictorily) both as ideal (as one thing) and real (as having several properties). In Appearance or Manifestation the aspects of being are supposed to lie on a level; but they are always a pair of aspects, one side of which is entirely dependent for its explanation on a reflection from the other, e. g. whole and parts, the favourite category for explaining the larger unities. But in the category of actuality there is nothing so merely potential, so unessential as mere essence recognised: and each actual is something firm and self-supporting which does not, like a phenomenon, merely borrow its reality from its antithesis or correlative. Thus we have, in a way, got back to the characteristics of immediate being: only, as we find it,we have this affirmation of the self-subsistence of reals contradictorily accompanied with the conviction of their necessary interdependence. It is a reflective (or correlated), not an immediate reality. There is no other world of being to have recourse to for explanation now: nor can we play back and forward from aspect to aspect of a reality which never comes forward itself, but only as a reflection on or from another. The world of reality is a self-contained world: its parts and phases are each hard realities: and for that reason they bear hard upon each other in the bond of necessity.

The total actuality falls naturally in our conception into three elements. We separate first the central fact—the nucleus of the business, the concentrated reality in reality: the fact in its mere identity and inner abstractness: the ultimate drift or inner possibility of things. Then we turn to the rest of the concrete fact—all without which the fact would not be itself—the detail and particularity: this we treat as a sort of materials or passive conditions from which the real fact is to be produced, on which it is dependent and which precede it in time. Lastly, in order to get back the unity of the fact from these two unconnected elements, we refer to some agency which puts them together. The End—or thing to be realised—(so to speak) has to be brought out by a motive agency (efficient cause) which imposes the form (or general character) on the matter and makes these one. By this analysis, however, we have only put asunder what is one experience and introduced a mechanical (external) unifier needlessly. The name ofconditionsis given to the particulars or details, considered apart from the rest of the fact, and hypothetically invested with an existence anterior to it, with the implication, first, that they are self-subsistent, and secondly, that they to some extent involve the restof it. Again, the general fact, the fact in its mere nominal or abstract generality or essence, its mere possibility, does not exist separately: every fact when in thought completed has its so-called conditions not outside it, but as constituent elements, aspects, or factors in it. Lastly, the so-called agency is the active element itself in the act, an aspect or factor in the totality: the aspect which keeps actuality together as a self-energising fact—aThathandlungand not a mereThatsache(to quote Fichte's phrase). Our practical and technical habits, where the agent is other than his materials and aims, lead us to draw the same distinctions in the realm of total Nature: they are aspects usefulin ordine ad hominemwhich we, without due modification, applyin ordine ad Universum.

It is originally in our practical operations that the distinctions of necessary and possible emerge,—with a view to the accomplishment of our desires and purposes. That is necessary which is required and needed if some bare plan is projected and is to be actualised: it is the condition or conditions without which the end cannot be attained. It is an epithet of the means. Possible, on the contrary, is an epithet of the end or plan, and denotes that there are means for its attainment, without however always specifying that this is known of the present or given instance. It is clear that everything as regards the application of these terms will depend on the definiteness with which the plan is conceived, both in itself so to speak and in its relations with the rest of the circumstances. On the other hand, when a result emerges without being included in the purpose, and without any means having been employed for attaining it, it is said to be a chance, accident, or contingency.

These terms are applied by analogy to the uses oftheoretical explanation. Just as in will you have a general aim to begin with, which becomes more and more determinate as it moves forward in the volitional process to execution; so in the attempt to understand the world you suppose it first of all the mere shadow or phantom of itself, a promise and potentiality of things to come: a next-to-nothing, which however you credit with a magic wealth of potential being. So much indeed may this possibility be emphasised that nothing more is needed: it is possible, and, without a thought of difficulties and counteractives, you could swear that it is actual[3]. Being removed above this solid land of actuality, cut off from the ties and bonds of conditions, it fancies itself moving in its vacuum; and being free from all bonds of actuality fancies itself actually free, or self-disposing, whereas it can only claim thisliberum arbitrium indifferentiae,so long as it remains bare and powerless possibility—a mere may-be, which, apart from all conditions, would exist only by a mere contingency, or freak of chance. This mere potentiality—being only an ante-dated, presupposed, and hypothetical actuality—being only a substance or substratum—must be raised out of its supposititious existence into reality by means of appropriate conditions. These conditions are necessary to its resuming its place or reaching a place in actuality. Thus each object becomes actual or real from a presupposed possibility by means of an external necessity. As in the former case the possibility was identified with power, and conditions were left out of sight as comparatively unimportant: so here the possibility—taken to lie at the root of the thing—is made a mere susceptibility, which would be nothing actual unless stimulated and necessitated from outside.This necessity in the very heart of actuality (which is its characteristic to the reflectional mode of mind) thus arises from the separation and hypostatisation of its elements into independent powers which are so far in stress and opposition. This is the climax of metaphysics—if metaphysics be the investiture of the dynamic factors of the notion with the power and character of supposed agents or forces. It appears in three phases, with the three categories of substance, cause, and reciprocity. To the first, reality is regarded as dominated by its mere underlying potentiality: the reality of the mere superficial contingents is controlled by the necessity of its latent or substantial being. To explain event or incident, here, is merely to bind it to the generic nature or the intrinsic doom, which—unexplained and inexplicable—manifests itself in an extrinsically fluctuating appearance of facts: e. g. the single crime is explained as the product of social conditions. Under the conception of Causality, each thing is a mere might-be which owes all its actuality to a definite antecedent or cause,—an antecedent termed for the moment unconditional, but anon reduced to dependence on further conditions. The effect is as a fact: but would not have been so unless for an earlier fact—i. e. unless the effect in a supposed earlier stage of its growth had been helped on by certain conditions or circumstances to acquire actual and full being in the effect. And cause and conditions can change places, according to what we happen to regard as the central nucleus or inner possibility of the effect. Lastly, the conception of reciprocity recognises that causality is rather an arbitrary simplification of reality into strands of rectilinear event; it remembers that Substance emphasises the dependence of each non-independent element on the supposed totality which they grow from,and doing so, it lays down the reversibility and essential elasticity of the causal relation. The cause in causing re-acts upon itself, and the effect is itself a cause of the effect, active as well as passive. The dependence in short is all-environing: nowhere is there any loop-hole to escape from necessity. Motives act on purpose, and purpose acts on motives: the stone hurls back the hand that hurled it.

Explanation is thus baffled and thus forced to recognise its own limitations. The simplest fact is beyond all the powers of explanatory science to do full justice to: for to know fully the 'flower in the crannied wall' after this method of explanation would involve endless multiples of action and re-action. The antinomy between necessity and contingency arose by following out the antithesis, so natural to us, between selfsame and different, essence and existence, substance and accidents, till they were invested with a right to independent place and function. But the separation of the abstract receptacle of possibility, self-same and essential, from the equally abstract conditions which fill it up and make it actual, is only the great human instrumentality of comprehension, which however is not reached until each thing is realised and idealised as an individual, which has universality and has particularity, but never either alone. Its universality is possibility—its particularity the aspect of contingency: but these aspects are in submission to an inclusive unity. The real when ill known seems contingent; when somewhat better known it seems necessary by external (physical) compulsion; in its truth to intelligence, the real is a self-active, acausa sui,or it is necessary by that self-determination which is the freedom of autonomy.

The view of the world under the category of actuality(Reality), and as dominated by the law of causality, is the culminating stand-point of scientific or reflective realism. It began with a mere descriptive science, naming and qualifying the successive aspects of being,—with description which passed through numeration into the definiteness of measurement. But all such determination was found to imply the existence of a permanent reality, or at least to involve the reference of one reality to another, outside of it, and yet not independent of relations to it, which had to make part of its nature. To the scientific realist the sum of fact presents itself independent of consciousness, as a complicated mass of real elements governed by laws and subject to necessities. Each thing or state of a thing is explained by reference to something outside it, which is its cause, and measured by something inside it which is its unit or atomic standard. Alternately the reference, and the unit are designated arbitrary (contingent) and necessary (essential): i. e. they are sometimes considered as only a way of looking at reality[4]—and sometimes as inevitable implications and conditions of reality.

All this is Objective Logic: or, so far as it does not realise its implications, it is Metaphysics. Its terms of thought[5]are in practice treated as elements of a reality which is what it is, apart from thought-conditions, apart from consciousness. As Hegel exhibits them in their interdependence, they hint their underlying thought-nature, which in their empirical applications is hardly apparent. For to the realistic stand-point mind and subjectivity are left out of account as only passive onlookers. The realist may no doubt speak of a Subject: but he means a real, a corporeal self,an actual amongst other actuals. If he speaks of mind and will, such mind and will are parts and ingredients in a general scheme of causes and effects; they are points of transition through which passes the moving stream of event. They also are things and substances. They are agents and patients, always both, no doubt but the chief circumstance to note is that they are actuals, and that even knowledge and will are regarded as species of action and motion.

When Protagoras laid down his maxim thatMan is the measure of all things, he stated, apparently in an ambiguous manner, that the fact of measure (and all that mensuration implies), and (we may add) the existence of correlation in actuality, presupposed for their explanation the assumption of Mind and subjectivity. Mind thus became the basis of all actuality which claimed to be objective—claimed, in short, to be actual. The truth and objectivity of the objective lies in the subjective; Mind is its own measure, i. e. the absolute measure, and it is self-relation. So Kant had taught and Fichte enforced. The basis of objectivity is the subjective; but a subjective different from that so-called by the plain man or by the naive psychologist. By the subjective he does not, as the plain man, understand the compound of body and soul, the living and breathing organism amid outer objects—nor, as the psychological idealist does, a psychical process, a series or bundle of states of consciousness, always contrasted with a reality,thereality outside consciousness. It is true that his language resembles the language of psychology: as Herbart and others have said, that is to be expected, for he talks of mind and consciousness. But the consciousness he speaks of is a unity that includes all space and all time: it is one and all-embracing, infinite, because not asindividual (psychological) consciousness set in antithesis to reality, as the other half of the duality of existence. It is consciousness generalised—Bewusstsein überhaupt—an eternal, i. e. a timeless consciousness, an universal i. e. not a localised, mind:—a necessary Idea, but with an inward self-regulating necessity. Such a consciousness Fichte called the Absolute Ego: but as we saw before, the adjective transforms the substantive. Such a consciousness, which is absolute self-consciousness, is the Idea:—no psychical event, but the logical condition and explanation of reality whether physical or psychical. The Idea is the presupposition of epistemology, but of an epistemology which claims to occupy the place of old usurped by metaphysics. Metaphysics has no higher category than actuality: transcendental logic shows that actuality rests in the Idea,—reality conceived and conception realised.

[1]Existence,as opposed toDasein, should thus imply the emergence into efficient being from a state of quietude or passive latency (Wesen).

[2]As Aristotle says, The brave man stands his ground, yet fearing: (cf. Tolstoi:Siege of Sevastopol). If he does not fear, brave is not the word for him.

[3]Put into Greek, the mere ἐνδέχεται (licet,orforsitan) is taken as equivalent to δύναμαι (possum).

[4]Herbart'sZufällige Ansicht, or contingent aspect.

[5]'Denkbestimmungen.'

The distinction between the psychical or psychological idea and the logical concept has been more than once alluded to. The idea or representation is under psychical form exactly equivalent to the undigested and passively accepted thing to which we give the title of physical or external. It is the ideal, in the sense of the psychical, pendant to the real: and hangs up in the mental view in the same way as the real object to the physical perception. It is in brief the crude object, considered not as existing, but as a state of consciousness—it is a reduplication in inner space of the thing in outer space. If we cannot say it is altogether mythological, we must however note that it is simply a psychical reflex, which has an existence only through abstraction, and is neither more or less than the object apprehended without comprehension.

The concept or notion is more than an image, and less than an image. An idea-image is symbolical of the unanalysed totality of the thing. But the notion is in the first instance due to an analysis, and secondly, a reconstruction of the thing. It takes up the thing in its relations: it thinks it, i. e. it abstracts and mutilates it, and artificially recombines. It implies analysis and synthesis. It produces a sort of manufactured thing: a mental construction. Butthe construction—as contrasted with the passivity that says first A and then B and a connexion of them—has the traces of subjective or mental violence about it: for violence there is in the act of comprehension. We have however got together in unity what actuality in the process of history let fall asunder, and could only, at the best, show as independent reals held against their will in ubiquitous relations of reciprocity. But the unity in which the individual sets the universal and the particular is an imported unity, which though it gives place and explanation to the elements of reality, seems to impose its synthesis upon reality. So far the concept is subjective only. It is an ample explanation including the facts, but not quite self-explanatory.Weconceive, and judge, and reason: but all this is alien to the object.

But there is a counterpart almost in antagonism to this. There is a concept, i. e. a grouping of existence into totals mediated by necessary links, which presents itself as embodied in things: and this embodied concept is the objective world. That world, apart from our interpretation and conception, offers itself as a synthesis of universal, particular and individual. It groups itself into systems, mechanical, chemical, and teleological. But in all of these there is lacking the evidence of the inward and subjective principle of unification. The unity is external, the members are held in a vice: their unity is given as a fact: it follows through certain laws and does not reveal itself. There is a want of perspicuity of connexion: logic—the need of inner explanation—in short, is not satisfied by this logic of facts. It is rather a realm of necessity than of freedom. It wants life; wants true self-activity. As in the subjective notion, the facts resented the hand of the logician (for here is the sphere of logic proper in the oldAristotelian sense), and refused to show themselves in the simple and transparent transitions of his argument: so the objective synthesis of the members of a mechanical system, or of a kingdom of means and ends, lacks the freedom and lucidity of inner movement which logical insight demands. Objectivity—the logic of fact—is a syllogism of necessity, so hardened and fixed that the necessity of the conclusion is more obvious than the self-determination by the syllogism.

The third stage of the Notion shows the union of the pellucidity and ideality of the syllogistic progress with the necessity and reality of the objective order. Here actuality and the concept are at one. At first as a mere fact—or more fact than idea. Life, organic life, is no doubt development: a totality which is in all its parts, and where parts have their being in the total. But life as such, the so-called vital principle, does not emancipate itself to a true universal: it is immersed in its particulars. Intellectual life, on the contrary,—the form of consciousness—rises independent and distinct from the totality of life. Psychology follows Biology. But as such—under the form of intellect and will—it has an antithesis no less fatal to its absoluteness than the opposite one-sidedness of life. There is—to put it in language more familiar to the present day—there is an analogue of life in all nature; and all reality, even the rock and the crystal, has its life-history. There is, properly speaking, no mere inorganic reality: organic life is universal. And then, going a step further, we attribute to all reality something analogous to a soul, or a consciousness. We talk, in rash moods, of mind-stuff and feelings, even in molecules. But as Spinoza has reminded us, terms like Will and Intellect have about them something finite, because they imply an antagonism to an object: they are predominantlysubjective. The reality in its final truth must be a subject-object: the adequacy of thought and being, the equation of real and ideal, the intellection which is life. And this is called Absolute Idea. It is natural to translate such an equation, when made a result, into a mere blank. And a blank it would be, if we suppose all that has gone before obliterated, and only the result left. Then, in the coincidence of opposites, we have only a zero of a gulf of negation. A life whichisconsciousness may seem to fade away like a vague ideal with no reality. A consciousness whichislife can be no consciousness at all. Theisand theis knowndare not coincide or they perish both.

A categorical proposition, says Hegel, can never express a speculative truth. That is to say: the subject over-rides the predicate, or the predicate makes you ignore the subject. The affirmation keeps out of sight the negation. To say that lifeisconsciousness makes us forget that the very assertion would not and could not be made, unless also life were other than consciousness. In its full proportion of meaning, therefore, the proposition must imply a return to unity through difference, to identity through otherness. Affirmation, fully realised, is re-affirmation through negation. Cognition is but recognition deepened by contrast. This law which governs—or rather which is—logic; the principle of identity through contradiction—must not be lost sight of in the supreme struggle of thought. The Idea is the unity of life and consciousness: but it is a unity in which they are (aufgehoben)—not a zero in which they utterly collapse.

We may illustrate in two ways. In the first we may compare the 'Ενεργεια of Aristotle. That is his formula of reality. Nominally it only means activity and actuality: and sums up the metaphysical formula forwhat really is,—the hard fact of being. But through it there glimmers the meaning of consciousness. It not merely is, but it means what it is. Energy of Soul is the end of life—the supreme fulfilling of desire, and consummation of tendency. As such it is, and feels that it is. It is the virtuous deed, which is its own reward. But Aristotle seems sometimes to fall from that identification of being and consciousness. The world ofpraxisparts from the world ofTheoria.In that case the activity is a mere activity—the outward shell of action: and then, as a supplement or complement to the abstract result of the activity the consciousness of achievement gets a distinct position as Pleasure: and the activity, now no consummation, but only a means to an end, get its completion from this arbitrarily abstracted shadow of reality.[1]

The second illustration may come from Mr. Spencer.

'We can think of Matter only in terms of Mind. We can think of Mind only in terms of Matter. When we have pushed our explorations of the first to the uttermost limit we are referred to the second for a final answer: and when we have got the final answer of the second we are referred back to the first for an interpretation of it.' Beyond this see-saw indeed we cannot go, so as to leave it behind: but in reality we transcend it. The Mind that is in terms of Matter is partly the region of psychic event, partly the world of science, art and religion. And psychic event is always antithetical to physical reality. But the spiritual world already includes the antithesis of psychical and physical, and including it keeps it as a principle of life and consciousness. The supreme or absolute mind does not indeedrise above Physis and Psyche so as to have no antagonism: but it is the unity of antitheses.

What those who crave for something higher than this rest in unrest, this life in consciousness and consciousness in life, want, would destroy the very condition of reality. Still philosophising, they would be above philosophy. They want an objective reality in which they may still their beating hearts,—a 'repose which ever is the same' and yet is not annihilation:—to sink into the great sea of being, and leave consciousness with its radical division behind. Such a craving philosophy, in Hegers hands, has no power of satisfying. It cannot, in the sense in which Jacobi and Schelling used the words, reveal Being. It cannot get at theThatexcept by means of theWhat,and is the eternal antithesis and correlation of these two. It will always be rational and logical—for it is its function to think being: and it will re-affirm that an unthought and a-logical being is a mere name, which in the language of humanity at least has no meaning, whatever it may stand for in the Volapük of imagined gods. To go beyond this correlation of Being and Thought is therefore no advance, but a relapse into theNatura Naturans, which, in its abstract completeness,is,but dare not be anything. Philosophy therefore in its supreme Idea is still the 'Ενεργεια of θεωρία, and not bare Οὐσία. For it mere Being is always Nothing. And to be actual it must live in antithesis and live victorious over antithesis. It follows the law of humanity(Und das heisst ein Kämpfer sein)—which can only exist in warfare as a church militant, but for continuous existence must also be a church triumphant. Like religion and art, it sometimes craves for utter union in the fullness of Being. Such a fullness is the unspeakable and the vain,—which we may picture as the apathy of Nirvana;but which is the absorption of Art, Religion and Philosophy,—the cease of consciousness and an abyss. We may call it—it matters not—Being.

These stages of the Notion must be examined in somewhat fuller detail. The subjective notion is the effort at the comprehension (at first subjective) of the two correlated elements into which actuality as such has been seen to fall—and to fall again and again without end. It brings out, or explicates (and with some opposition to the divisions of reality) the unity which was presupposed by the antagonist and inseparable reals. Hitherto we have had two things or aspects in relation and move from one to the other by an act of reflection. But to get two points in relation, they must belong to or exist in a unity. The divided reality of cause and effect must, if it is to be intelligible, submit to a unification of its elements. It is comparatively easy to get on if we are always allowed to have one foot on solid ground, and can move the other. Give us a standing-point, and explanation is simplified. But to get a notion of things is, it may seem, to transcend them, or get beneath them, and take a stand-point outside actuality which shall unify them. If we added to immediate being a further element to explain it, it may be said we now superadd a third to explain the two others. Over and above the different and related elements, there is assumed to be a unity. And at first it is certainly such a superimposed element, added to the facts, and regarded as our way of looking at them, as a subjective notion or grasp, holding together what is in itself reluctant to be unified.

The three aspects or factors in a Concept are the Universal, the Particular, and the Individual. These are what Hegel calls the 'moments' or 'vanishing factors' of the notion. They are 'vanishing,' becausein their logical mobility they form a pellucid union: if they are distinct, yet they refuse to be independent of one another. Or, we may say, each in its truth is the meeting-ground and unification of the two others, thus forming a sort of cycle of perpetual movement. And in this way we may see that the addition of the third has really been a simplification: it has made two one. For the Unit which welds together is not atertium quid, but simply the explicit statement and assertion of the truth implied in the antithesis, which was yet inseparability, of the two others. And for the same reason, neither mere universal nor mere particular nor mere individual are full reality, when taken apart. One can understand how Hegel could speak of the 'Bacchantelike intoxication' of the concept. It may be illustrated by the following utterances in which a modern psychologist labours to express the complex unity of mental fact. First we are told that a 'nervous shock,' e. g. the awakening caused by a sudden blow, or a simple sensation (so-called), is the ultimate unit of consciousness. And if this were all, it would correspond to the qualities of immediate being, which we can suppose measurable: we should get a science of purely empirical psychology based on psychical atoms. But, immediately after, it appears that the 'relational element' is never absent from the lowest stage of consciousness. Accordingly, besides feelings, theremust berelations between feelings. And that means a good deal: especially if we also note the proposition that, in truth, 'neither a feeling nor a relation is an independent element of consciousness,' Evidently you cannot have either without both, and it seems difficult to have both when neither is independent. Nor does it mend matters to learn that 'a relation is a momentary feeling': for that only seems a way of implying that it is, and yet is not,a feeling. Such are the difficulties that beset the sincere attempt to comprehend. The fixed points of explanation stagger under the burden of truth; and their unsteadiness shows that they lack the full foundation. Yet that foundation—it must be repeated—is not something extra: it is the underlying unity which gives life to the relativity of the separates.

For the peculiarity of the Notional stand-point is that it insists on thorough comprehension. The usual explanation refers us from a later to an earlier, from a strange to a familiar, from a complex to a simple, from compound to elements. It keeps analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction apart. To comprehend is, on the other hand, to light up earlier by later and later by earlier, and carry both into their unity. It does not merely refer existence to its ground, phenomenon to law, or effect to cause; because beyond these it has still to reveal the unity of nature which carries on one of these into the other. Thus, the explanatory method in Social Science may either refer us to the simple elements or parts out of which the total is composed, or to an earlier stage in the same institution's life. The analytical sociologist does the former: the historical the latter. Neither really faces the problem. For if the whole is made up of parts, it is made up of parts which have been characterised by the whole. If the later has come from the earlier, that only shows that the nature of the earlier was inadequately ascertained. Development—which implies a permanent which changes, an identity which is also different,—is thus more than mere reference to an antecedent; because the antecedent must also figure as a simultaneous.Cessante causa, cessat et effectus.But here, in the concept (or λόγος) or syllogism, the permanent exists as the—may we call it—consciousnesswhich binds together the elements of reality, as the life and the history, which is ideally continuous through real changes, and is a real unity through the distinctions of appearance.

Such a comprehension e. g. of the State would show that though it must have a universal aspect, a particular, and an individual, yet these are not severally identifiable with the divisions of sovereign, executive, and people, but that in each of the latter the three moments of the notion must appear, and that e. g. the people is not mere people, but also executive and sovereign, just as the sovereign is no mere sovereign, but also executive and of the people. The same may be illustrated in the so-called individual. A man in his special department and sphere of action may very likely lose the sense of his wholeness and his integrity,—perhaps in more senses than one! He may reduce himself to the limits of his profession. But in so doing he becomes untrue, or, in Hegelian parlance, abstract: he fails to recognise the universality of his position. All work, however petty, which is done in the right spirit, is holy.

'One place performs, like any other place,The proper service every place on earthWas framed to furnish man with: serves alikeTo give him note, that through the place he seesA place is signified he never saw.'

It is a false patriotism, for example, which is inconsistent with the spirit of universal brotherhood: and there is something radically wrong with the religion, on the other hand, which cannot be carried into act amid the pettiness of ordinary practical interests. The universal, again, is not a world beyond this world of sense and individuals: if it were so, it would itself be a mere particular. It is rather the world of senseunified, organised, and, if we may say so, spiritualised. And an individual which is merely and simply individual is an utter abstraction, which is quite meaningless, and in the real world impossible. Or, if we prefer to express the same thing in connexion with the mind, sensation apart from thought is an inconceivable abstraction. Sensation is always alloyed with thought, and we can at the mostsupposepure sensation to exist amongst the brutes. The mere individual opens out and expands: and in that expansion we see the universal: (sensation is thought in embryo). But, on the other hand, the developed universal concentrates itself into a point: (thought returns into the centre of feeling).

The same process of particular, individual and universal, which thus goes on under the apparent point of the notion, is more distinctly and explicitly seen, with due emphasis on the several members, in the evolution of the notion into the Judgment and the Syllogism. The judgment is the statement of what each individual notion implicitly is, viz. a universal or inward nature in itself, or that it is a universal which individualises itself. The judgment may, therefore, in its simplest terms be formulated as: The Individual is the Universal. The connective link,—the copula 'is,' expresses however at first no more than a mere point-like contact of the two terms, not their complete identity. By a graduated series of judgments this identity between the two terms is drawn closer, until in the three terms and propositions of a syllogism the unity of the three factors of the notion finds its most adequate expression in (subjective) thought.

It may be a question how far syllogisms as they are ordinarily found are calculated to impress this synthesis of the three elements upon the observer. The three elements there tend to bid each other good-bye, and areonly kept together by the awkward means of the middle term, and the conjunction 'therefore.' In these circumstances it becomes easy to show, that the major premiss is a superfluity, not adding anything to the cogency of the argument. But under the prominence of this criticism of form, we are apt to let slip the real question touching the nature of the syllogism. And that nature is to give their due place to the three elements in the notion: which in the syllogism have each a quasi-independence and difference as separate terms, while they are also reduced to unity. The syllogism expresses in definite outlines that everything which we think, or the comprehension which constitutes an object, is a particular which is individualised by means of its universal nature. As always, thought refers to reality; and a notion has to be carried out into objectivity. But as Aristotle complained, matter is recalcitrant to form. The objective appears at first only as an opposite, and instead of revealing, it rather obscures and condenses the features of subjectivity.

Objectivity, or the thought which has forgotten its origin and stands out as a world, may be taken in three aspects: Mechanical, Chemical, and Teleological. That is to say, the mode in which groups or systems naturally present themselves in the objective world, is threefold. The contradiction which stands in the way of comprehending objectivity comes from the fact that it contains subjectivity absorbed in it. In other words, the object is at once active and passive; as thought and subjectivity it should be its own synthetiser, as objectivity it is necessitated to interdependence, and the subjectivity, at this stage, is in abeyance. Consequently, either the two attributes co-exist, or they cancel each other, or they are in mutual connexion.

(1) In the first case the objects are independent, andyet are connected with one another. Such connexion is an external one, due to force, impulse, and outward authority. The principle of union is implied: but the objects are mutually determined from without. The more, for example, an object acts upon the imagination, the more vehement is the reaction of the mind towards it.—(2) But if the object is independent, as has been allowed, then the determination from without must really come from within. Thus desire is a turning or bent towards the object which draws it. The desiring soul leans out of itself. It gravitates towards a centre: and it is its own nature to be thus centripetal. The lesser objects of themselves draw closer around the more prominent object.—(3) But if this gravitation were absolute, the objects would lose their independence altogether, and sink into their centre. Accordingly if the independence of these objects is to remain, there must be, as it were, a double centre, the relative centre of each object, and the absolute centre of the system to which it belongs. In each of these three forms of mechanical combination, the objects continue external and independent. A mechanical theory of the state regards classes as independent, seeks to produce a balance between them, separates individuals and associations from the state, and, in short, conceives the state as one large centralising force with a number of minor spheres depending upon it, but with a greater or less amount of self-centred action in each of them.

The fact is that an object cannot really be thought as thus independently subsistent. Its real nature is rather affinity,—a tendency to combine with another: it requires to receive its complement. Every object is naturally in a state of unstable equilibrium, with a tendency to quit its isolation and form a union. Thistheory, which is called the Chemical theory of an object, regards it as the reverse of indifferent: as in a permanent state of susceptibility. When objects thus open and eager for foreign influences combine, there results a new product, in which both the constituents are lost, so far as their qualities go. The qualities of the constituents are neutralised. A man's mind, for example, prepared by certain culture, meets a new stimulus in some strange doctrine, and the result is a new form of intellectual life. But at this point the process, which such a form of objectivity represents, is closed: all that remains is for the product to break up one day into its constituent factors. There is no provision made for carrying it on further. Hence if we are to have a self-regulating system of objectivity, we must rise above the Chemical theory of objects. And to do that, the first course is to look at the objective world asregulated(though not immanently constituted) by the Notion.

The Notion as regulative of objectivity,—as independent and self-subsistent, but as in necessary connexion with Objectivity,—is the End, Aim, or Final Cause. According to this, the Teleological and practical theory of the Universe[2], the object is considered as bound to reproduce and carry out the notion, and the notion is looked upon as meant to execute itself in reality. The two sides, subjective and objective, are, in other words, in necessary connexion with each other, but not identical. This is the contrast of the End and the Means. By the 'Means' is meant an objectwhich is determined by an End, and which operates upon other objects.—(1) The End is originally subjective: an instinct or desire after something—a feeling of want and the wish to remedy it. It is confronted by an objective mass, which is indifferent to these wishes: and manifests itself as a tendency outwards,—an appetite towards action. It seizes and uses up the objective world.—(2) But the End in the second place reduces this indifferent mass to be an instrument or Means: makes it the middle term between itself and the object.—(3) But the means is only valuable as a preparation to the End regarded as Realised, which thus counts as the truth of the thing. These are the three terms of the Syllogism of Teleology: the Subjective End, the Means, and the End Realised. It is the process of adaptation by which each thing is conceived as the means to some end, and which actively transforms the thing into something by which that end is realised. In the last resort it presents us with an objective world in which utility or design is the principle of systematisation: and in which therefore there is an endless series of ends which become means to other and higher ends. After all is done, the object remains foreign to the notion, and is only subsumed under it, and adapted to it. We want a notion which shall be identifiable with objectivity—which shall permeate it through and through, as soul does body. Such a unity of Subjective and Objective—the Motion in (and not merely in relation to) Objectivity—is what Hegel terms the Idea.

The first form of the Idea is Life, taking that as a logical category, or as equivalent to self-organisation. The living, as organisms, are contrasted with mere mechanisms. The essential progress of modern science lies in its emphasis on this aspect of the Idea: which includes all that the teleological period taught about adaptation, and only sets aside the externality of means to ends there found. The savant of the last centuryand the beginning of the present dealt with the object of his inquiries as a mechanical, chemical, or teleological object. The modern theorist tends to see the world as one self-evolving Life. According to the naturalist of last century, kinds of animals and plants were viewed as convenient, and perhaps arbitrary arrangements: according to the moderns, these kinds represent the grades or steps in the life of the natural world.

What, then, is the nature of the process which we call Life? Is it adequately or definitely defined as 'a continuous adjustment of internal to external relations'? Or is it a good deal more than anything the word 'correspondence' implies? According to Hegel it is nothing so simple, but a syllogism with three terms, and a syllogism moreover which permutates its terms and premisses. There is, in the first place, the term, which is also a process, of self-production. The living must articulate itself, create for itself limbs and members, and keep up a perpetual re-creation of morphological and structural system of parts. Secondly, there is the assimilation of what is external to the living individual. If there is to be life, spiritual or bodily, there must be a physiological intus-susception of foreign elements. Without this the first term or process is impossible. Thirdly, there must be a term or process of Reproduction or generation by which the living being passes itself on as a new unit. All life, mental or bodily, involves Reproduction.—These are the three terms of the process of vitality.

But such a life, considered as merely organic, the life studied in Biology, is only a fragment. The truer life is in the genus, not in the individual: the consciousness, the sensation which inwardly unifies the diversity of organic processes. The universal has become the medium in which the Idea exists: it exists no longer in immediacy.The mere natural life gives place to the life of the Spirit. The life of the Spirit has the double form of Cognition and Will:—the theoretical and the practical action of the Idea: or Truth and Goodness. In short, the Idea divides into two halves, which yet remain the same at bottom: Reason and the World: but yet there is reason in the world. The action of the Idea, or its process at this stage, is to bring these two terms into connexion, and show their ideal unity. Beginning with Reason, it goes on to discover reason in the World. Truth consists in the adequacy of object to notion. Such adequacy is the Idea: and an object which thus corresponds with its notion is an ideal object. The ideal man is the True Man. Truth is the revelation of rationality from the objective world: and Cognition is the name for that process. On the other hand, Goodness is the realisation of rationality in the objective world: and the Will is the name for that process. Truth proceeds from the Objectivity: Goodness from the Subjectivity. But truth can only proceed (analytically) from the objective world, in so far as it is produced (synthetically) by the subjectivity. And, on the other hand, when the good is realised in objectivity, it is submitted to the process of Cognition.

With the unity of Life and Consciousness, the Absolute Idea, we reach the supreme effort of Logic. In Bacon's words, 'the truth of being and the truth of knowing is all one' (cf. p. 224). That is the absolute condition of comprehending reality: the principle of Absolute Idealism, so far apart from its psychological wraith, and yet compelled to employ the same language. But after all it is Logic, i. e., only the supreme logical condition of the reality of the physical and psychical world. And it gains reality at the cost of the disruption of its elements: it lets the Is slip from the Is known—theestfrom thecogitatur—Being from consciousness. Or, in less mysterious language, fundamental philosophy, or Logic, gives place to the concreter system of Philosophy—the Philosophy of the Outward and of the Inward actuality,—of Nature and Mind.

The reader of theDivina Commediamay hardly need to be reminded that, at each of the grander changes of scene and grade in his pilgrimage, Dante suddenly finds himself without obvious means transported into a new region of experience. There are catastrophes in the process of development: not unprepared, but summing up, as in a flash of insight, the gradual and unperceived process of growth. There is birth and death in the spiritual world: and such are moments of sudden lapse, abrupt conversion, when the waters of Lethe close around, and thereafter all things are new. There are such moments of accumulated and abnormal intensity also in the Hegelian philosophy when a new cycle of idea suddenly appears. Such are the epochs of change at the great crises from Being to Essence, and from Essence to Notion. There is a revulsion, a sharp turn of the path which dialectic can enforce but cannot smooth away,—on that path which dialectic indeed, as opposed to the old logic of identity, shows not to be a mere smooth continuity. All development is by breaks, and yet makes for continuity.

This is again exemplified in the passage from Logic to Physics. The reality which presents itself to the philosopher as Nature is a world of reason—but, as it stands, it only lives as some speechless work of art. It is, so to speak, the picture on the wall—the reflection that is cast by the fuller reality of experience. Reason here is in the garb of sense-perception. Nature is the silent image—thetableau vivant—which becomes intelligent, speaking, and real, in the observing and comprehending mind. It is the statue of Condillac, not yet invested with the minimum of sensibility and consciousness. Nature is or shows all that the Idea contained, but contained only in possibility, as a logical condition of reality. It shows it in reality—and that is a reality spread through endless times and spaces. Its unity, its meaning, its continuity are broken up into fragments. Yet as Nature, i. e. in its structural unity, and not in the dispersion of things and elements, it is all a unity of development and has a life-history written in its organism for intelligence to read and to reconstitute, on the assumption that all its accident and irregularity is but the inevitable imperfection of reality as given in parts and successions.

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