The Social Science Association not only produce their own pamphlets but made new editions and translations of existing texts. The 'Digest' states: "This booklet contains the first two of the four final chapters of Hegal by Edward Caird (William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh and London, 1883), at present out of print. [...] This private edition has been prepared for the SSA Study Group and is not for sale." There is no date on the 'Digest' but it is believed to have been published in the late 1940s. This public domain text is provided to help students prepare for the George Walford International Essay Prize (offering £3,500 each year).

Part One: THE PROBLEM OF PHILOSOPHY - STATEMENT OF IT BY KANT, FICHTE, SCHELHNG, AND HEGEL.

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY
It is the peculiar strength of the modern time that it has reached, a clear perception of the finite world as finite; that in science it is positive - i.e., that it takes particular facts for no more than they are; and that in practice it is unembarrassed by superstition - i.e., by the tendency to treat particular things and persons as mysteriously sacred. The first immediate awe and reverence, which arose out of the confusion of the absolute and universal with the relative and particular, or, in simpler language, of the divine with the human, the ideal with the real, has passed away from the world. The artist and the poet, indeed, still keep up the confusion or identification; it is their work to give

"To one brief moment caught from fleeting time
The appropriate calm of blest eternity."

But we no longer take the artist or poet as a prophet; we cannot seriously and permanently worship the objects which he makes us admire. Whenever the evanescent light "that never was on sea or land" fades away from them, we are obliged to see that it never was there, and to treat the things and beings on which it fell as merely individual things and beings, like the things and beings around them. "We are finable to believe in a God who is here and not there, in an ideal which is a happy exception. And the poet's vision, therefore, will necessarily become to us a dream, if it is not conceived as pointing to something more universal, of which he does not speak. The scientific sense, which has gradually communicated itself even to many of those who are not scientific, forces us to see in particular things not ideals, but merely examples of general classes, and to regard them all as connected to each other by laws of necessary relation, in such a way that they are ipso facto deprived of any exceptional or independent position. How can we treat anything as deserving of praise or worship for itself, if, to explain it, we have to look, not to itself, but to its conditions and causes! And when science bids us treat everything in this manner, how can there be anything left to reverence? "Zeus is dethroned, and Vortex reigns in his place." (Aristophanes, "Nubes" 381, 828)

Nor can we count it a more respectable worship when we are told to adore the unknown, which always lies at the end of every finite series of causes and effects, so long as no reason is given to suppose that what lies beyond our knowledge is other than a continuation of the chain that lies within it. The undeveloped terms of an infinite mathematical series have no preference over those that have been ascertained, and we cannot find any special reason for admiration in the fact that the series cannot be completed. An endless stream of finites is the negation of all worship, and it does not matter whether we regard its endlessness or the finitude of its parts. To find an object of reverence, we must be able in some way or other to rise to an original source of life, out of which this manifold existence flows, and which, in all this variety and change, never forgets or loses itself.

A world of endless determination is a prosaic world, into which neither poetry nor religion can enter. To rise to either, we must find that which is self-determined, - we must have shown to us a fountain of fresh and original life. When we have found that, the multiplicity of forms, the endless series of appearances, will begin to take an ideal meaning, because we shall see in them the Protean masks of a Being which is never absolutely hidden, but in the perishing of one form and the coming of another is ever more fully revealing itself. It is by this suggestion of such a self-revealing unity that Goethe at a touch gives poetic life to the picture of change which modern science has set before us -

"In the floods of life, in the storm of deeds,
Up and down I fly, Hither, thither weave,
From birth to grave, An endless weft,
A changing sea Of glowing life.
Thus in the whistling loom of Time I ply,
Weaving the living robe of Deity."

The great question of philosophy is whether such a unity in totality, such a self-determined principle of infinite change, can in any sense be verified, or made an object of knowledge. And this for us is so difficult a question, just because the modern consciousness of the natural world, as an interconnection of phenomenal causes, is so clear and precise. No longer is it possible, as it once was, to intercalate the ideal, the divine, as it were surreptitiously, as one existence in a world otherwise secular and natural. Under the acknowledged reign of law, the world is a connected drama in which there is no place for episodes. Hence we can find the ideal anywhere, only by finding it everywhere; we can see anything higher in the world than contingent and finite existences, only by recasting our view of it as a whole; we can get beyond the scientific conception of phenomena in their connection as causes and effects, only by transforming that conception itself, by awakening science to a new consciousness of its presuppositions, and by leading it through this consciousness to a reinterpretation of its results. It no longer avails to assail finite science from the outside, in the way of finding exceptions to its laws, or phenomena that it cannot explain. A long discipline has taught it to regard such exceptional or residual phenomena simply as the means of correcting and widening its ideas of law. If it is assailable at all, it is from the inside, in its fundamental conception of law itself, - in its idea of that universal necessity under which it reduces all things.

Now the great idealistic movement of Germany was, in its essence, an attempt to find a basis of this kind. Kant, its first representative, asked where a place can be found for "God, freedom, immortality," consistently with the universal reign of law in the natural world - in other words, consistently with the necessary connection of all objects of experience in space and time. Nor did he seek to find such a place by questioning the universality of this necessary interdependence of all things and events; rather he reasserted it, and finally confirmed it, by the proof that such universality is the precondition of all intelligible experience. Objects, things, and events - a world of experience - exist for us, and can exist for us, only in so far as our sensitive impressions are determined and related to each other according to universal principles. Objectivity and universality are equivalents of each other, and to say that an object might exist which was not definitely determined as to its quality and quantity, or definitely related to all other objects in space and time both in its persistence and in its changes, is to use words without meaning. If we could imagine such an object - or, what is the same thing, if we could imagine a series of impressions or perceptions which yet it was impossible to bring under the general laws of the connection of experience - we should be conceiving of something inconsistent with the very existence of experience. If there were such objects, they could not be objects for us.

NATURE AND FREEDOM
While, however, the reign of law is thus determined to be absolute for all objects of experience, and while the principle of rational empiricism, that there exists a universal and unchangeable order of things, is thus raised from a presumption to a certitude, it is just here, at the point where the last possibility of escape from the necessity of nature seems to be closed up, that Kant finds the means of deliverance. This order of nature, which seems to shut us in, is no foreign necessity to which we are subjected. It is we who forge our own chains. It is our own understanding that prescribes the law of necessary connection for its objects, as it is our own sensibility that supplies the forms of time and space under which they appear to us. In so far, therefore, as the general framework or systematic form of the whole goes, it is we who make the nature by which we fear to have our freedom, our spiritual life, or independent self-determining energy, extinguished. And as it is just this general systematic form in which lies the necessity from which we are shrinking, it may be said in strict truth that we are afraid of our own shadow, - of that which the unconscious working of our own minds has created. What we took for "things in themselves," independent forces by which we were controlled, are really phenomena - things winch exist only for us, and which exist, even for us, only by the activity of our own thought.

It is true, indeed, that we too form, in one point of view, a part of this phenomenal world; we are present to ourselves as objects existing, like other objects, in space and time, and going through changes which are determined according to necessary laws. But this phenomenal presence to ourselves is not our whole being. I am not merely one object among many other objects in the world of which I am conscious; I am the conscious self without which there would be no world of objects at all. A conscious being, as such, cannot simply reckon itself among the things it knows, for while they exist only for it, it also exists for itself. It not only has a place among objects, but it is the subject for which they exist. As such it is not one of the conditioned substances in time and space, whose changes are to be explained by the things that condition it; it is the principle in relation to which such conditioned things exist, the cause of the necessity to which they are subjected.

It is not in time and space at all, for these are but the forms of its perceptions - forms which cling to its objects as objects, but cannot be applied to it, the subject for which these objects exist. The source of the categories - the principles of necessary connection in experience - cannot be brought under the categories. The thinking self cannot be subjected to the forms of sense under which the phenomenal world is presented to it. Even if we could say nothing else about it, we could at least deny of it all the predicates that are by their very nature determinations not of a subject, but of an object. But can we say nothing else! Is the subject a mere unity to which knowledge is referred, and which, therefore, is not only exempted from all the determinations of objects, but is void of all determination of its own? Can we say only that it is free in the negative sense, that that necessity of relation which belongs to phenomena, as such, cannot be predicated of it, seeing it determines other things, but not itself? Or can we go on to show that it is free in the positive sense, that it determines itself, and can we follow it in this self-determination, and trace out the forms in which it manifests its freedom? The answer, Kant holds, is given by the moral consciousness, which is a consciousness of ourselves as universal subjects, and not as particular objects. This is shown by the fact that conscience ignores all external determination.

It is the consciousness of a law that takes no account of the circumstances of the phenomenal self, or of the necessary conditions under which its changes take place. In thinking of ourselves as under this law, we necessarily regard ourselves as free - as the authors, and the sole authors, of our actions; we abstract from all the limits of nature and necessity - from all the impulse of desires within, and all the pressure of circumstances without us. For this law is a "categorical imperative" that listens to no excuses, but with its "Thou oughtst, therefore thou canst," absolutely throws upon ourselves the responsibility for our own deeds. Such a law we might be disposed to treat as an illusion, because of its direct contradiction to our empirical consciousness of ourselves, if we had no other consciousness of ourselves; but our previous examination of the empirical consciousness has already obliged us to refuse to apply to the subject the knowledge which we have of ourselves as objects of experience. The necessity of nature is thus taken out of the way by the proof that the knowing self is not a natural phenomenon, and the moral consciousness finds nothing to resist its absolute claim to belief and obedience. The "primacy of practical reason" is thus established, and a place is found for the freedom of spirit, without any doubt being cast upon the necessity of nature.

And with this freedom come, according to Kant, the other elements of our higher consciousness - immortality and God. For the primacy of the practical reason involves that the necessity of nature is somehow harmonized with the law of freedom, however little it may be possible for us to comprehend this harmony. Hence the phenomenal self - the subject of feeling and desire - must conform itself to the real or noumenal self; and the pure self-determination of the latter must determine also the whole nature of the former. But we are not able to represent this to ourselves except as a gradual process of transformation of our sensuous nature by our freedom, - a process of transformation which, because of the essential difference of the two, can never be completed; and thus the moral law postulates the immortality of man as a subject, who is at once natural and moral. In like manner we are compelled, in accordance with the primacy of practical reason, to suppose that the whole system of phenomena which we call nature is in harmony with the purely self-determined life of spirit; in other words, we are obliged to assume a correspondence of happiness, or our state as natural beings determined from without, with goodness, or our state as moral beings, who are determined only by themselves from within; and this, again, leads us back to God as the absolute Being, in whom, and by whom, the two opposite worlds are brought to a unity.

Thus, then, Kant finds a way of reconstructing the spiritual, without prejudice to the natural, world. For if, on the one hand, the world of nature is treated as phenomenal, while the world of spirit is regarded as the real, and the only real, world; yet, on the other hand, the phenomenal world is recognized as the only world of knowledge, while the real world is said to be present to us merely in faith. Now faith is essentially a subjective consciousness, which cannot be made objective; for to make anything objective is to conceive it as a one thing among others in space and time, and determined in relation to the others by the law of necessity. So much is this the case, that we are not able to represent to ourselves the law of freedom except by thinking of it as if it were a law of nature. For what is the law of freedom t It is that we should be determined only by the self; but the self is nothing in particular; it is the unity to which all knowledge is referred; its only essential character is its universality. Hence, to be determined by the self is to be determined by the idea of universality. To find out what is morally right, we have only to ask what actions may be universalized, and the moral law may be expressed in the formula: "Act as if by your action the maxim or rule which it involves were about to be turned into a universal law of nature."

STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS OF KANT
Without following Kant any further, it is possible now to point out what are the merits and what are the defects of his philosophy, viewed as a reconciliation of nature and spirit, or of experience and that higher rational consciousness which is expressed in religion and philosophy. Its main merit is, that it shows that experience rests on something which, in the ordinary sense, is beyond experience; or, what is the same thing in another point of view, that it brings out the relativity of being to thought, - of objective reality to the conscious self for which it is. In this point of view - in so far as it shows that reality as known is phenomenal, or essentially related to consciousness, the Kantian argument is irresistible. Its weakness lies in this, that it does not carry the demonstration to its legitimate result; it still retains the idea of a "thing in itself," out of relation to thought, even where it regards such a thing as problematical; and it admits the idea of a subjective affection, in relation to which the thinking self is passive, though it confesses that it is only by the reaction of the thinking self that such an affection can be turned into an object of knowledge.

Through the rift of this proton phendos there creeps into the system an absolutely irreconcilable dualism, which yet Kant is continually attempting to heal. Sense and understanding, necessity and freedom, the phenomenal and the real self, nature and spirit, knowledge and faith, are pairs of opposites that he can never either separate or reconcile. He cannot separate them, for his whole philosophy starts from the proof that nature is phenomenal, and must be referred to that which is not itself natural; and, on the other hand, he necessarily conceives the noumenal - that which is set up against the phenomenal - as the absolutely real, and as determining, and in a sense including in itself, the phenomenal. Yet he cannot reconcile them; for he has assumed, to begin with, that there is in the object as opposed to the subject, in sense as opposed to spirit, a foreign element which can never be exorcised or completely assimilated, although both in knowledge and in action it may be partially subdued and subordinated. The antithesis has thus no higher unity beyond it, which can bring its antagonistic members to a final reconciliation; and that reunion of these members, therefore, which is, after all, necessary to the system, must remain a postulate or requirement, which cannot be realized - which can even be seen to be incapable of realization. The result of Kant, therefore, seems to be to put the very problem to be solved for the solution, - to show the equal necessity of two elements, which are each of them proved to have no meaning except in relation to the other, while yet this relation is conceived as purely negative, and therefore - since a purely negative relation is no relation at all - as absolutely impossible.

DUALISM IN KANT
It was perhaps just because a consciousness of this truth - that a relation, even if negative, always implies a unity beyond it - was wanting to Kant, that he could admit the necessary relation of physical and metaphysical reality to each other, while yet denying the possibility of reaching more than an external harmony between them. Yet it is clear, to consider only Kant's first principle, that is, to say that existence means existence for consciousness, implies not merely that there is a relation between consciousness on the one side and existence on the other (in which case the relation would exist, not for the conscious being himself, but for some one else), but it implies also that consciousness transcends the dualism between itself and its object. It means, in short, that though, within certain limits, we oppose the subject to the object, the consciousness to that of which it is conscious, yet that from a higher point of view this antagonism is within consciousness; or, to put it from the other side, that consciousness, as such, overreaches the division between itself and its object.

And the same reasoning must be applied to all the other contrasts which in the system of Kant spring out of this fundamental opposition - the contrasts of necessity and freedom, of nature and spirit, of phenomenal and noumenal. A philosophy that would work out the true lesson of the Kantian idealism must not weaken or slur over any of these oppositions; but as little can it deal with them as absolute oppositions, or, what is the same thing, treat the two terms as both standing on the same level, as if the one were as comprehensive as the other. For if it does so, it must necessarily end by contradicting the premises from which it starts, by refusing to admit any relation between terms, whose relation was the very starting-point of the whole reasoning.

One who, like Kant, refers nature to spirit, necessity to freedom, the phenomenon to the noumenon, must he prepared, to explain the former out of the latter; in the language of Hegel, to show that spirit is the truth of nature, that freedom is the truth of necessity, that the noumenon is the truth of the phenomenon, i.e., that in spite of their relative opposition, there is a point of view from which the former term in each case includes the latter, as the whole includes the parts. Or, to take the example already given, he must show that consciousness, though it may be primarily regarded as the subject of knowledge, is not simply opposed to the object, but necessarily includes it in itself.

To gather to a point what has just been said, Kant proves that the system of nature and necessity is not independent of intelligence, but exists only for it. But the intelligence is not only consciousness, but self-consciousness - not only theoretical, but practical. It not only is determined, and so apprehends itself as belonging to the world of nature, but it determines itself, and so is conscious of itself as belonging to a world of its own - a world of freedom. And this world of freedom it is obliged to conceive as the reality, of which the other is merely the phenomenon. What Kant, however, does not perceive, is that, on his own showing, these two worlds are essentially relative to each other, so that either, taken apart from the other, becomes an empty abstraction. He has, indeed, proved that existence unrelated to a conscious self is such an abstraction. But it is clear that the pure self, in its universality - as opposed to all the matter of the desires - is equally abstract. To will the self, and only the self, is to will nothing at all.

Self-consciousness always implies consciousness of something else than self, and could not exist without it. Self-determination, therefore, though it may be relatively opposed to determination by the not-self, cannot he absolutely opposed to it, for with the not-self the self also would disappear. But if this be true, the world of intelligence and freedom cannot be different from the world of nature and necessity; it can only be the same world, seen in a new light, or subjected to a further interpretation. And this new interpretation must show that the necessity of nature is itself explicable as a necessary element or factor in the manifestation of the principle of the free life of intelligence. Not, indeed, that the point of view of Kant, from which the two kingdoms of necessity and freedom seem to be in extreme opposition to each other, is to be entirely rejected. On the contrary, that opposition forms a necessary stage in thought and reality. The drama of human life is the struggle of freedom with necessity, of spirit with nature, which in all its forms, within and without us, seems to the purely moral consciousness to wear the guise of an enemy. But the possibility of the struggle itself, and of a final victory in it, lies in this, that the enemy exists in order to be conquered; or rather, that the opposition is, in its ultimate interpretation, an opposition of spirit to itself, and the struggle but the pains that accompany its process of development.

FICTHE AND SCHELLING
There are two bypaths in following which it is possible to lose the full meaning of the thought just expressed. On the one hand, it is possible to dwell on the higher reality of spirit in such a sense as not to leave due place for the lower reality of nature: it is possible to emphasize Kant's demonstration of the phenomenal character of the world of experience, till that world is reduced to a mere semblance or appearance, and to exaggerate his assertion of the noumenal character of the world of intelligence, till the pure abstract consciousness of self is identified with the absolute. On the other hand, it is possible to insist on the unity, which is presupposed in all the opposition and antagonism of the nature and the spirit, till the opposition and antagonism itself is reduced to an illusion; it is possible, in other words, to treat all differences as mainly accidental shiftings of the external mask under which the absolute identity is hidden, and to regard all conflict and antagonism as but the play of shadows, - "such stuff as dreams are made of," - while the one reality is the external repose of the infinite substance in itself. These two byways of interpretation, which are the natural results of a partial apprehension of the full problem stated by Kant, were followed by Fichte and Schelling, respectively. Fichte, following the way of a one-sided idealism, reduces nature to a mere negative condition, which spirit - by some incomprehensible act - lays down for itself.

To attain consciousness of itself, the absolute ego must limit itself, and by this self-limitation it gives rise to a non-ego, which, howover, is quite as much a part of itself as the limited ego, with which alone it is consciously identified. The infinity of the ego, however, reappears as an impulse to strive against this self-made limit, and by continual removal of it to a greater and greater distance, to approximate to that pure consciousness of itself which it can never attain, because in doing so it would at once cease to be conscious at all, and so cease to be. This is the strange enchanted round, within which the speculation of Fichte circles, seeking an outlet in vain. In the attempt to reduce nature to a nonentity - a self-created object of thought - and to make spirit all in all, he turned the life of spirit itself into something shadowy and spectral, - a conflict with a ghost that could not be laid. To the strong, almost ascetic spirit of a Fichte, rejoicing in stern self-command to put nature beneath his feet, and regarding the world but as an arena for the moral athlete to win his victories over himself, such a theory might commend itself by its apparent exaltation of the ego at the expense of the non-ego.

But we need not wonder that the sympathetic imaginative genius of Schelling soon broke away from it, to assert that the intelligence could find itself in nature as well as in itself: or that he sought to substitute for Fichte's principle that "Ich ist Alles," the wider principle that "Alles ist Ich " i.e., that it is one ideal principle which manifests itself in the natural and the spiritual world alike. Unfortunately, in correcting Fichte's over-statement of one of the two sides of the Kantian philosophy, Schelling fell into an equal over-statement on the other side. In opposing a subjective idealism which found reality only in the self, he was led, by gradual but necessary steps, to reject idealism altogether, and to seek the real in a coequal unity of nature and spirit, which gave no preference to the one above the other as a manifestation of the absolute.

But to say that the absolute equally manifests itself in nature and spirit, is almost equivalent to saying that it does not manifest itself at all; for if the distinguishing characters of mind and matter are treated as unimportant, and their identity alone is insisted on, what distinctions can be of importance? The absolute unity becomes necessarily a pure "indifference," as Schelling called it, an absolute which rests in itself and withdraws itself from all contact with the intelligence, and which can be apprehended, if at all, only in a Neoplatonic ecstasy of immediate intuition. In this way Schelling, though content for a time, with Hegel, to speak of the absolute as spirit or reason, gradually withdrew from these words all their fullness of meaning, until it became necessary and just for Hegel to reassert against him the primitive lesson of Kantian philosophy, that "the absolute is not substance but subject" i.e., that the unity, to which all things are to be referred and in which they must find their ultimate explanation, is the unity of self-consciousness.

THE PROBLEM FOR HEGEL
When, however, Hegel thus rejected both these partial solutions of the Kantian problem, solutions which really involve the omission of one or other of its elements, and when he again restated the problem itself in all its fullness, he could no longer, like Kant, escape from its difficulties by an alternation between intelligible and phenomenal reality, or between the spheres of reason and faith. For him it was necessary to show that the kingdoms of nature and spirit are one, in spite of all their antagonisms; nay, it was necessary for him to show that this antagonism itself is the manifestation of their unity. The freedom that belongs to man as a rational and moral being could no longer be saved by lifting it, as it were, into another world, a "tópos noetós," out of the reach of physical necessity; it must be shown to realize itself in and through that necessity itself. "Out of the eater must come forth meat; out of the strong, sweetness." What had been regarded as absolute opposites or contradictories, mind and matter, spirit and nature, self-determination and determination by the not-self, must be united and reconciled, and that not by an external harmony, but by bringing out into distinct consciousness the unity that lies beyond their difference, and gives it its meaning.

To do this, indeed, was to break with all the ideas of logical method that had hitherto ruled the schools; it was to treat as ultimately pliant and evanescent the most fixed distinctions of the old metaphysics. Yet it was not to be done, as it had often been done by mystics like Boheme and intuitionists like Jacobi, by simply rejecting the claims of the logical understanding to lay down any law for the higher matters of the spirit. Such a resource was not permitted to one who, like Hegel, declared that self-consciousness itself was the ideal unity, by which, or in reference to which, the world must be explained. In a philosophy that acknowledged such a principle, the movement of thought, by which the most fixed distinctions of the understanding were dissolved and its most absolute oppositions transcended, must be a logical movement, and it must be conscious of its own logic. Its "reason," to use a common distinction, must not be set against its "understanding," but must include and satisfy it.

If its higher philosophical or religious truth was not brought down into the region of common-sense, at least it must gain a clear conscience toward common-sense by fulfilling all its reasonable demands, and leaving it no excuse to deny the rationality of that which transcended it. Especially must such a philosophy be ready to meet on its own ground that higher kind of common-sense called science; it must be scientific, even if it was necessary for it to be something more. It is this that makes Hegel so vehement in his opposition to all those who, like Schelling, lay claim to a special immediate vision or intellectual intuition of truth from which the mass of men are excluded. To those who quote the Scripture that "God giveth truth to his beloved in sleep,"(Psalms 77.2) he is ready to assume the skeptical attitude of rationalism, and to point out that "what is given to men in sleep is for the most part dreams."

Yet it is not in the interest of rationalism that Hegel speaks, but in the interest of that ideal truth which rationalism denies. But it is his inmost conviction that there are not two truths, but one, and that that is no secure path to a higher kind of knowledge, which begins by a quarrel with the facts of life and the ordinary consciousness of these facts. As the late Professor Green has said, that "there is no other genuine enthusiasm of humanity than one which has traveled the common highway of reason - the life of the good neighbor and honest citizen - and can never forget that it is only on a further stage of the same journey;" so, in Hegel's view, philosophy can permanently vindicate that highest synthesis which lifts thought from the finite to the infinite, only when it has fully recognized and done justice to the finite consciousness with which it starts. The claim of special inspiration is an anachronism for the modem spirit which demands that the saint should also be a man of the world, and that the prophet should show the logical necessity of his vision. For "a man's a man for a' that," and, however sensuous and rude his consciousness of himself and of the world may be, it is, after all, a rational consciousness, and it claims the royal right of reason to have its errors disproved out of itself. And a philosophy which does not find sufficient premises to prove itself in the intelligence of every one, and which is forced to have recourse to mere ex cathedra assertion, is confessing its impotence.

IDEALISM AND DUALISM
But this resolve to bring together poetry with prose, religion with experience, philosophy with the science of the finite, the "vision and the faculty divine" with common - sense and the natural understanding, obviously entails upon speculation a harder task than it has ever before encountered. Dualism in some form or other has for centuries lightened the task of philosophy by a sort of double book-keeping or division of labor, by which the hardest contrasts and antagonisms of life were evaded. Even for Kant, who brings the two worlds face to face, there is still a "great gulf fixed" between them, and moral freedom moves safely in a vacant " kingdom of ends," where it never comes in contact with any necessity of nature. But for Hegel, all such devices to keep the peace, so to speak, between heaven and earth - to put some interval of separation "between the pass and fell incensed points of mighty opposites" are vain and fruitless. If the Kantian principle, that self-consciousness or self-determining spirit is the ultimate reality of things, is to be maintained, it must be shown to be a principle capable of explaining the phenomenal world. That very necessity of nature, from which Kant sought to find an escape for man's higher life, must be shown to be the means of realizing it.

PHILOSOPHY AND COMMON SENSE
How this is possible we shall consider afterwards; for the present it need only be remarked, that it is just Hegel's determination to avoid all shifts and subterfuges, - to encounter fairly all the difficulties of the spiritual or ideal interpretation of life, and to work out that interpretation faithfully even in those spheres which an ideal philosophy has not usually ventured to touch, - that forces him to deal with the problem of the reconciliation of opposites. It is no freak of an over-subtle logic, " trying for once in a way to stand on its head," that leads him to ask whether, beneath all the antagonisms of thought and reality, even those that have been hitherto conceived to be absolute contradictions, there is not a principle of unity, which in its development at once explains the opposition, shows its relative character and its limits, and finally dissolves it.

This question was, in fact, forced on him by the gradual transformation of the Kantian philosophy in Fichte and Schelling. Their speculations made it manifest that the idealism of Kant could be maintained, only if self-consciousness were found to be a principle adequate to the explanation of that which is the very opposite of self-consciousness - i.e., only if spirit could be shown to be the reason, of nature, and mind to be the key to matter. And the apparent breach with common-sense which is involved in Hegel's denial of the law of contradiction as ordinarily understood, was the direct result of the very strength of common-sense in Hegel himself, which would not let him be content without bringing his highest spiritual consciousness into relation with the teachings of the ordinary understanding, and demanding that in one way or another the difference between the two should be brought to a definite issue.
 

Part Two: THE PRINCIPLE OF CONTRADICTION AND THE IDEA OF SPIRIT.

WHEN Aristotle laid down the Law of Contradiction as the highest law of thought, and opposed it to the Heraclitean principle of universal flux, he argued that, unless distinction is maintained, - unless things are definitely what they are, and are kept to their definition, - knowledge and thought become impossible. If A and not-A are the same, it is no longer possible to find any meaning in the simplest statements. Even the doctrine of flux itself must mean something, and that obviously implies that it does not mean anything else; even the skeptic, therefore, when he assails the law of contradiction, tacitly gives in his adhesion to the truth he assails. To this argument no objection can be taken, if it be regarded as vindicating one necessary aspect or element of thought, and not as expressing its whole nature. Thought is always distinction, determination, the marking off of one thing from another; and it is characteristic of Aristotle - the great definer - that he should single out this aspect of it. But thought is not only distinction, it is at the same time relation. If it marks off one thing from another, it, at the same time, connects one thing with another. Nor can either of these functions of thought be separated from the other: as Aristotle himself said, the knowledge of opposites is one. A thing that has nothing to distinguish it is unthinkable, but equally unthinkable is a thing which is so separated from all other things as to have no community with them.

LAW OF CONTRADICTION
If, therefore, the law of contradiction be taken as asserting the self-identity of things or thoughts in a sense that excludes their community - in other words, if it be not taken as limited by another law which asserts the relativity of the things or thoughts distinguished - it involves a false abstraction. A half-truth is necessarily distorted into a falsehood when taken as the whole truth. An absolute distinction by its very nature would be self-contradictory, for it would cut off all connection between the things it distinguished. It would annihilate the relation implied in the distinction, and so it would annihilate the distinction itself. If, therefore, we say that everything - every intelligible object or thought as such - must be differentiated from all others, yet we must equally say that no object or thought can be absolutely differentiated; in other words, differentiated so as to exclude any identity or unity which transcends the difference.

An absolute difference is something which cannot exist within the intelligible world, and the thought which attempts to fix such a difference is unconscious of its own meaning. If it could succeed, it would, ipso facto, commit suicide. We can stretch the bow to the utmost point consistent with its not breaking, but if we go an inch further, it ceases to be stretched at all. We can embrace in one thought the widest antagonism consistent wth the unity of thought itself, but an antagonism inconsistent with that unity is unthinkable, for the simple reason that, when the unity disappears, the antagonism also disappears with it.

If then the world, as an intelligible world, is a world of distinction, differentiation, individuality, it is equally true that in it, as an intelligible world, there are no absolute separations or oppositions, no antagonisms which cannot be reconciled. All difference presupposes a unity, and is itself, indeed, an expression of that unity; and if we let it expand and develop itself to the utmost, yet ultimately it must exhaust itself, and return into the unity. This is all that Hegel means when he, as is often asserted, "denies the validity of the laws of identity and contradiction." All he denies, in fact, is their absolute validity.

"Every finite thing is itself, and no other." True, Hegel would answer, but with a caveat. Every finite thing, by the fact that it is finite, has an essential relation to that which limits it, and thus it contains the principle of its destruction in itself. It is therefore, in this sense, a self-contradictory existence, which at once is itself and its other, itself and not itself. It is at war with itself, and its very life-process is the process of its dissolution. In an absolute sense, it cannot be said to be, any more than not to be. "Every definite thought, by the fact that it is definite, excludes other thoughts, and especially the opposite thought." True, Hegel would answer, but with a caveat.

Every definite thought, by the fact that it is definite, has a necessary relation to its negative, and cannot be separated from it without losing its own meaning. In the very definiteness with which it affirms itself, therefore, is contained the proof that its affirmation is not absolute. If we fix our attention upon it, to the exclusion of its negative, if we try to hold it to itself alone, it disappears. To maintain it and do it full justice is already to go beyond it. Hence we are obliged to modify the assertion, that every definite thought absolutely excludes its negative, and to admit that, in this point of view, it also includes or involves it. It is, and it is not, itself, for it contains in itself its own negation. If we are to reassert it again, it can only be so far as we combine it with its negative in a higher thought, in which, therefore, it is partly denied and partly affirmed.

LAW OF RELATIVITY
Thus neither things nor thoughts can be treated as simply self-identical - as independent or atomic existences, which are related only to themselves. They are essentially parts of a whole, or stages in a process, and as such they carry us beyond themselves, the moment we clearly understand them. Nor can we escape from this conclusion by saying that it is merely a subjective illusion, and that the objects really remain, though our mind passes from the one to the other. In regard to thoughts, this is obviously a subterfuge; for the thought is not something different from the process which our minds go through in apprehending it - it is that process. And in regard to "things," the distinction is equally inapplicable; for what we are considering is the conditions essential to the intelligible, as such, and the "things" of which we speak must be at least intelligible, since they exist for our intelligence.

The truth therefore is, that definiteness, finitude, or determination, as such, though they have an affirmative or positive meaning, also contain or involve in themselves their own negation. There is a community or unity between them and their opposites, which overreaches their difference or opposition, though it does not by any means exclude that difference or opposition in its proper place, and within its proper limits. Of any definite existence or thought, therefore, it may be said with quite as much truth that it is not, as that it is, its own bare self. This appears paradoxical, only because we are accustomed to think that the whole truth about a thing can be expressed once for all in a proposition; and here we find that two opposite propositions can be asserted with equal truth. The key, however, to the difficulty is, that neither the assertion nor the denial, nor even both together, exhaust all that is to be said. To know an object, we must follow the process of its existence, in which it manifests all that is in it, and so by that very manifestation exhausts itself, and is taken up as an element into a higher existence.

ABSOLUTE CONTRADICTION IMPOSSIBLE
The thought that there is a unity that lies beneath all opposition, and that, therefore, all opposition is capable of reconciliation, is unfamiliar to our ordinary consciousness for reasons that may easily be explained. That unity is not usually an object of consciousness, just because it is the presupposition of all consciousness. It escapes notice, because it is the ground on which we stand, or the atmosphere in which we breathe; because it is not one thing or thought rather than another, but that through which all things are, and are known. Hence we can scarcely become conscious of its existence until something leads us to question its truth. Our life is an antagonism and a struggle, which rests upon a basis of unity, and would not be possible without it. But immersed in the conflict, and occupied with our adversary, we cannot at the same moment rise to the consciousness of that power which is working in him and in us alike. Rather are we disposed to exaggerate the breadth of the gulf that separates us, and the intensity of the repulsion that sets us at war with each other. We disown the community that binds opposite ideas together, because we think that in no other way can we emphasize sufficiently our own watchword.

We lose sight of truth itself, that we may assert our truth. Of this we may find examples in every sphere of life. Thus we find the scientific man exaggerating the contrasts of subjective and objective, thought and fact, to a point that would make all science unmeaningful. The demand so often made, "Give us facts, and not hypotheses or ideas," does not mean what it says; for enough of facts may be collected - say, about the articles in a room, or the history of an hour's life in it - to break down the strongest memory. What it does mean is, "Give us facts that will answer the questions of our intelligence" i.e., facts that are ideas.

But the scientific man feels so strongly the necessity of struggling against subjective opinions and "anticipations of nature" in his own mind and the minds of others in order that he may reach the objective truth, the ideas which are facts, that thought itself seems to be his enemy. In his struggle against "mere ideas," he loses sight of that ultimate unity of thought and things which is the presupposition of all his endeavors, and indeed the very principle which he is seeking to develop and to verify. It is, however, the moral and religious consciousness, which, just because its conflicts are those that most deeply divide us against ourselves and against each other, is most obstinate and stiff-necked in insisting on the absoluteness of its divisions and oppositions. Thus pious feeling is prone to exaggerate the division between divine and human, and even fears to admit the possibility of the intelligence of man apprehending in any sense the nature of God."

Our fittest eloquence is our silence when we confess without confession that "Thy glory is inexplicable and beyond our reach." Such words may have a certain relative truth; but if we took them in their literal meaning, that divine and human reason are different in kind, and that God cannot be known, religion would be an impossibility. In like manner, the moral sense is jealous of the admission that good overreaches the antagonism between itself and evil, or in any sense comprehends, even if it be at the same time declared that it transcends, that antagonism: such an idea seems to it "a confusion of right and wrong." Yet the great moral teacher of our time, who above all has insisted that there is a hell as well as a heaven, is driven to meet what he thinks a superficial benevolence towards "scoundrels" with the cry, "Yes, they are my brethren, hence this rage and sorrow!" In other words, "Admit the antagonism which I assert in all its real depth and intensity, and I will admit that there is a unity beyond it." It is the unity itself that gives its bitter meaning to the difference, while at the same time it contains the pledge that the difference can and even must be reconciled.

UNITY OF THE WORLD
"The intelligible world is relative to the intelligence." This principle, which was expressed by Kant, but of which Kant, by his distinctions of phenomenon and noumenon, reason and faith, evaded the full meaning, is taken in earnest by Hegel. He is therefore forced to deny the absoluteness even of those antagonisms that have been conceived to be altogether insoluble: for any absolute antagonism would ultimately imply an irreconcilable opposition between the intelligence and its object. In other words, it would imply that the intelligence is not the unity that is presupposed in all the differences of things, and which, therefore, through all these differences, returns to itself. The essential unity of all things with each other and with the mind that knows them, is the adamantine circle within which the strife of opposites is waged, and which their utmost violence of conflict cannot break. No fact, which is in its nature incapable of being explained or reduced to law, - no law, which it is impossible ever to recognize as essentially related to the intelligence that apprehends it, can be admitted to exist in the intelligible universe. No absolute defeat of the spirit, - no defeat that does not contain the elements of a greater triumph, can possibly take place in a world which is itself nothing but the realization of spirit.

TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION
In a sense, this principle may be said to be incapable of proof, since a proof of it would already presuppose it. But a disproof of it would do so equally. And skepticism, when it brings this very result to light - in other words, when in its own necessary development it destroys itself - gives all the proof of it that is necessary. The self-contradiction of absolute skepticism makes us conscious of the unity of thought and things, of being and knowing, as an ultimate truth, which yet is not an assumption, because all belief and unbelief, all assertion and denial, alike presuppose it. The Kantian "transcendental deduction" was only a further, though still a partial, development of this idea; for it was an attempt to show what are the primary elements of thought involved in the determination of objects, as such; in other words, to show in detail what is meant by that identity or unity of the intelligence and its object, which is implied by all knowledge. As skepticism proved that to doubt the intelligence in general was suicidal, because with the intelligence disappears also the intelligible; so Kant's deduction proved that to take away any special part or form of the intelligence, any category of the understanding or form of sensibility, was to make knowledge impossible.

Unfortunately, for reasons already indicated, Kant treats this unity as existing only in the phenomenal world of experience; and while he gives us a catalogue of the different elements out of which it is made up, he does not show how, in such diversity of operation, the intelligence can still be one, and conscious of itself as one. Kant, in other words, deals with the intelligence as if it were a well-constructed machine, each and all of whose parts are necessary for an external purpose, and are externally combined for that purpose; but not as an organic unity, whose parts are united by the one life that expresses itself in them all, and whose purpose is only that life itself.

But to know the world is not an accidental or external purpose of the intelligence; it is the activity through which alone the intelligence can become conscious of itself - or, in other words, can exist as an intelligence at all. And the various categories or forms of thought by which it makes the world intelligible, are not external instruments it uses, but modes of its own activity, or stages in its own development. To complete the work of Kant, and clear it from these defects, philosophy must not only undertake the analysis of intelligence in relation to the intelligible world, a work which, after all, leaves us "with the parts in our hands, but the informing spiritual unity wanting."

THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE WORLD
It must also retrace, with watchful consciousness, the unconscious synthetic process in which the intelligence first manifests its life, and through which it becomes possessor of itself and of its world; and it must show how each of the forms of that life has its reason and meaning in the one principle from which they spring. In so far as philosophy can succeed in this, it may meet skepticism with the further answer of a "solvitur ambulando;" for the rationality of the world is best proved by rationalizing it. Still, it would be a mistake to think that reason's certitude of itself has to wait for this completed proof, or that there is no real answer to skepticism except omniscience. The primary answer of skepticism to itself - the answer which it gives by refuting itself - already is sufficient to show that reason can have to do only with itself; that all its conflicts and struggles are with itself, however they may seem to be with another; and that, therefore, there can never come into its life an antagonism which it has not in itself the means of reconciling. For reason, therefore, there can be no foreign object for which it is impossible, in Kant's language, "to unite with its consciousness of itself," and no external necessity which it cannot make the means of its freedom or self-realization.

To develop this idea, however, and to develop it in such a way as to give room for all the oppositions of thought and life, is something more than to feel it, rest in it, and enjoy it like a mystic. "The life of God - the life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to the absolute unity of all things - may be described as a play of love with itself; but this idea sinks to an edifying truism, or even to a platitude, when it does not embrace in it the earnestness, the pain, the patience, and labor, involved in the negative aspect of things." In other words, the intuitive apprehension of the absolute unity is nothing, unless that unity be brought into relation to the differences of the finite world; when it is asserted by itself it loses all its meaning.

To the man of the world or the man of science, a religious or speculative optimism is apt to seem like a child's confidence in a world which he has never tried, rather than like that peace of spirit which has been confirmed by the completed experience of all its effort and pain. The words of triumph mean much or little, just in proportion to the greatness of the struggle, and the thoroughness with which it has been fought out, and they will not be listened to with patience on the lips of any one who has evaded his strongest enemies. The critical spirit is justly jealous of any solution that does not show, on the face of it, that the difficulty has been thoroughly sounded.

Hence there is always a difficulty in producing a mutual understanding between those, on the one hand, whose minds are directed to the particular interests of life or to particular spheres of science, and those, on the other hand, who, either as poets, or religious men, or philosophers, live habitually in contemplation of the unity that is beyond all difference, the reconciliation that is above all conflict. By the conditions of their life, the former seem to be as naturally biased toward a hard and unyielding dualism, which distrusts all "ideology," all harmonizing and reconciling views of existence, as the latter are prone to an easy idealism, which charms away the difficulties and reconciles the oppositions of life as if by a magic word. To bring about such an understanding, each of the two sides must be drawn out of itself, and brought into relation to each other.

Now it is Hegel's effort, on the side of philosophy, so to overcome the abstractness of the speculative idea and develop its unity into difference, that he may force the scientific or practical consciousness, in its turn, to overcome its abstract and one-sided assertion of difference, and bring it into relation to the unity of thought. For if the unity of thought, the unity of the intelligence with itself, is to be found in all the intelligible universe, - in all the "subtlety of nature," and all the complex movement of history, - that unity must be more than the simple identity which philosophy has often found in it.

If, as it was the aim or result of the Kantian philosophy to prove, self-consciousness is the principle of unity to which the world must be referred and by which it must be explained, self-consciousness must be a microcosm, - a world in itself, containing and resolving in the transparent simplicity or unity of its "glassy essence" all the differences and antagonisms which, in intensified form, it has to meet with in the macrocosm. The intelligence must not, therefore, be conceived as a mere resting identity, but rather as a complete process of differentiation and integration, which rests only in the sense that its movement returns upon itself.

It will thus be, in Aristotle's language, an enérgia akinesías; in other words, it will be without movement or change, not because it is not active, but because its activity is determined only by itself. For only through such a concrete conception of the intelligence in itself will it be possible to understand how it should be able to reach beyond itself, and so to rise above the opposition of thought and things. Otherwise it must seem impossible that knowledge of the world should be attained, except by the absolute passivity of the intelligence; by the mind emptying itself of itself, and becoming a pure mirror, or a tabula rasa on which the external object may impress its image.

Now what is involved in the idea of self-consciousness? Kant, who first pointed out that the unity of the ego is presupposed in all our knowledge, has given a curious account of it. "Of the ego," he says, "one cannot even say that it is a conception of anything; it is rather a consciousness that accompanies all our conceptions. In this I, or He, or It - the thing which thinks - we have before us nothing but a transcendental subject of thought, an x or unknown quantity, which is known only through the thoughts which are its predicates, and of which, if we separate it from those thoughts, we cannot form the slightest conception. If we attempt to do so, we are obliged to revolve round it in a continual circle; for we cannot make any judgment about it without being obliged to presuppose and make use of the idea of it, - an inconvenience which is inevitable, because consciousness in itself is not, strictly speaking, the idea of a particular object, but a form for all ideas which deserve the name of knowledge - i.e., for all ideas through which any object is thought."

This remark of Kant's brings out the peculiarity of self-consciousness, that it is no simple unity or identity; for if so, it must be purely an object or purely a subject, but really it is both in one; all other things are for it, but it is for itself. This strikes Kant as "an inconvenience," which prevents us from knowing it as we may know other things, - as if the ego somehow, by reason of its duality as both subject and object, stood in its own light, and was guilty of a kind of circular reasoning in pretending to know itself. But when we look at the matter more closely, it would seem that Kant is here himself guilty of a curious paralogism, in attacking what is our very highest type of knowledge, and rejecting it because it does not conform to his own preconceived ideas.

It is as if one should say that it is impossible to see the sun because we cannot throw the rays of a candle upon it. But as it is the light that reveals both itself and the darkness, so it is self-consciousness through which we know both it and all other things. If knowledge is the relation of an object to a conscious subject, it is the more complete, the more intimate the relation; and it becomes perfect when the duality becomes transparent, when subject and object are identified, and when the duality is seen to be simply the necessary expression of the unity, in short, when consciousness passes into self-consciousness."

It is just the intelligence itself which Kant declares to be unintelligible. And the reason is, that Kant's mind was secretly possessed with the preconception that the one thing entirely intelligible is a pure abstract identity which has no division or difference in it all. This preconception, however, was shown by Kant himself to be a false one. It was his special work, in the 'Critique of Pure Reason,' to prove that every object of knowledge, as such, involves a relation to a subject; in other words, that it is not a simple identity, but involves difference, and unity in difference. But if so, then self-consciousness is the knowable par excellence, in so much as in it the object, which is distinguished from the subject, is, at the same time, most perfectly coalescent with it.

It was, in fact, just because Kant took pure identity as his ideal of knowledge, that he was driven to seek for absolute truth in a region beyond the objective consciousness, or, what to him was the same thing, beyond the phenomenal consciousness. And as such an identity is really unknowable and incomprehensible, he was obliged at the same time to confess that this region of pure self-identical subjectivity cannot be reached by knowledge, but only by faith. If, however, Kant's " reason " had thus to enter into the "intelligible world" or "kingdom of ends" "halt and maimed," it was because he had maimed it himself. It was his own definition of truth, or rather his tacit preconception of truth, which made truth unattainable to him, and which even made him reject its very quintessence and antitype in self-consciousness as unintelligible.

UNITY-IN-DIFFERENCE OF MIND
This failure of Kant, however, directly points to a new conception of knowledge, and a reform of logic. The old analytic logic was based on that very idea of identity by which Kant was misled. It started with the presupposition that each object is an isolated identity, itself and nothing more. It accepted the law of contradiction in a sense that involved a denial of the relativity or community of things. It separated object from subject, one thing from another; or, if it admitted relations between things, these were regarded by it as altogether external, or outside of the real nature of the things in themselves. But such a theory of knowledge is, as it were, broken in pieces against the idea of self-consciousness, in which the true unity, the pattern of all knowledge, is seen to be essentially complex or concrete, a unity of differences, a circle of relations in itself. Self-consciousness is the standing enigma for those who would separate identity and difference; for it is not merely that, in one aspect of it, self-consciousness is a duality, and in another aspect a unity; duality and unity are so inseparably blended in it, that neither has any meaning without the other.

Or, to put it still more definitely, the self exists as one self only as it opposes itself, as object, to itself, as subject, and immediately denies and transcends that opposition. Only because it is such a concrete unity, which has in itself a resolved contradiction, can the intelligence cope with all the manifoldness and division of the mighty universe, and hope to master its secrets. As the lightning sleeps in the dewdrop, so in the simple and transparent unity of self-consciousness there is held in equilibrium that vital antagonism of opposites, which, as the opposition of thought and things, of mind and matter, of spirit and nature, seems to rend the world asunder. The intelligence is able to understand the world, or, in other words, to break down the barrier between itself and things, and find itself in them, just because its own existence is implicitly the solution of all the division and conflict of things.

To see, however, that this is the case, and that in the intelligence, as the subject - object, there lies an adequate principle for the interpretation of nature and history, it is necessary that we should explain more fully what is involved in the idea of self-consciousness. For such an interpretation is possible only in so far as in self-consciousness are implicitly contained all the categories by which science and philosophy attempt to make the world intelligible, - a doctrine, the detailed proof of which is the object of the Hegelian Logic.

Part Three: THE HEGELIAN LOGIC

When we say that knowledge is possible, we imply that the intelligence can raise itself above the accidental, partial, changing point of view which belongs to the individual as such. If each man were forced to make himself the center of the universe, and to regard things as important and real in proportion as they immediately affected his senses or were directly instrumental to the satisfaction of his wants, neither intellectual nor moral life could possibly be his. To make either attainable, he must be able to look at things in ordine ad universum-i.e., he must be able to discount the influences of his immediate position and circumstances, even of his personal wishes and feelings, and to regard himself individually as one object among the other objects he knows. He must feel something of the same indifferent interest in himself, and apply something of the same impartial judgment to himself, which he feels and applies in relation to that which does not affect him at all, to that which is distant in time and space from the immediate circle of his concerns. To live as a moral being, the individual must look at himself and treat himself from the point of view of the family, of the state, or of humanity, giving to his own desires and interests just the weight which they deserve when regarded from such higher center, and not the exclusive weight which they claim when they are allowed to speak for themselves.

The precept, that we should do to others as we would that they should do to us, has a practical value, not because in its literal sense it clearly marks out the path of duty, for our wishes for another might be as unreasonable as our wishes for ourselves,-but because the effort to put ourselves sympathetically in another's place is generally the surest way of lifting us out of the close atmosphere of personal feelings. In like manner, intellectual life, the life of knowledge, is primarily an effort to break away from those things that are, as Aristotle says, "first for us," the immediate appearances and apprehensions of sense, which are different for each of us, and continually changing, and to reach those things that are "first by nature" - the laws or principles which manifest themselves no more and no less in one set of appearances than another. To use an illustration of Kant, the confused Ptolemaic system is the one most natural to us: we would fain account for everything, in however complex and difficult a way, on the supposition that the universe revolves round our individual selves. But science and philosophy seek to introduce the Copernican system, with its simple and transparent order, by changing our point of view to the sun, the universal center around which all things really revolve.

UNIVERSALITY OF MIND
But can we thus really get out of ourselves? Can we free ourselves from the influence of our surroundings, and our very nature as individuals? Or, if we can do so to some extent, is there not a limit to the process in our very humanity? "Man never knows," says Goethe, "how anthropomorphic he is." If we can overleap the chasm that separates us from our fellow-men, can we expect also to get rid of the tendency, more or less definitely to humanize nature in the very act of taking knowledge of it? Or, even supposing that we can transcend all the divisions that separate finite things and beings from each other, is there not still an absolute gulf fixed between the finite and the infinite, which confines us to time and space, and hinders us from seeing things sub specie aeternitatis?

This problem was one which already troubled Aristotle in the dawn of psychology. He solves it by the doctrine that the intelligence is not, strictly speaking, one thing or being to which you can assign separate qualities or attributes, and so distinguish it from other things and beings. It is, he declares, a universal capacity, and "has no other nature than this, that it is capable." It has "no foreign element" mingled with its pure universality, "which might confuse and interrupt its view of the object." Hence it is able "to master all objects-that is to say, to understand them." Translating these pregnant words into more modem terms, what they imply is, that the intelligence is not one thing among others in the intelligible world, but the principle in reference to which alone that world exists; and that, therefore, there is nothing in the nature of intelligence to prevent it from understanding a universe which is essentially the object of intelligence.

The thinking subject, no doubt, is also an individual among other individuals; but, as a thinking subject, he is free of the world, emancipated from the limitations not only of his own individual being, but even of his generic nature. The individuality of a self-conscious being, as such, rests on a basis of universality ; if he is conscious of himself in opposition to that which is not himself, he is at the same time conscious of self and not-self in relation to each other; and that implies that he is conscious of the unity that includes both. "We may say, therefore, that he is not limited to himself; that just because he is a self, he transcends himself; that his life includes, in a higher sense, even that which it seems, in a lower sense, to exclude. Or, to approach more nearly to Aristotle's language, a self is not merely one thing or being, distinguished by certain qualities from other things or beings; rather he may be said to have all qualities or none; for he is capable of relating himself to all, and so making them parts of his own life: yet he is limited to none as a definite and final qualification of his own being. If he were, he could not be conscious of it as an object.

OBJECTIVITY OF THOUGHT
If this view be true, it follows that the intelligence of man, as it is implicitly universal, is capable of rising above, and abstracting from, all purely subjective associations, and seeing objects as they are in themselves, or, what is the same thing, from a universal point of view. This act of abstraction, in a more or less definite form, is implied in all man's existence, intellectual, moral, and even natural, in so far as even in his simplest sensuous experience there is the latent working of a rational principle. But it is implied in a higher degree in science: for science is essentially the conscious and deliberate effort to break away from subjectivity, and see things as they objectively are. As such it involves a severe discipline of self-restraint, and even, we might say, a painful process of self-abnegation; for it is by no means an easy thing to thrust aside all our preconceptions and assumptions, or to allow them to be weighed in the scales of nature, without any attempt to bias the decision by which they may be found wanting.

Yet in thus renouncing its subjective prepossessions, the mind is not renouncing itself. It is not, as Bacon seems to think, reducing itself to a passive mirror of an objective world. Rather it is thus making room for its own true activity, bringing itself into that central or universal attitude in which alone it can show what it is as mind. The activity of an intelligence is not pure till it has got rid of the accidental or particular element that clings to its immediate self, for then only can it rise to a new universal life, in which its movement is one with that of the object which it contemplates. For it is not, as Aristotle showed, like a thing which has special qualities, and which perishes when they are changed. It is not involved in the fate of the particular opinions and prepossessions which keep it from the knowledge of objects, but rather begins to energize freely and powerfully only when these have been cast aside.

Universality is readily confused with emptiness, because it is a freedom from all that is particular. And so a universal activity may easily be taken for passivity, because it is not the self-assertion of the subject of it against anything else. In this sense it is sometimes said that true science consists in silencing our own ideas that nature alone may speak. Nature, however, can speak only to an intelligence, and as an intelligence speaks in it. The aim of the negative discipline of science is to free the subjective intelligence from all that separates it from the object; but if by this process thought were really made passive and empty, along with the partiality and one-sidedness of consciousness, consciousness itself would disappear.

The process of the liberation of thought from itself, therefore, is not the mere negation of thought, which would necessarily be the negation of the object of thought also; it is the negation of thought and being alike as separate from each other, and the revelation of their implicit unity. Nor is this a pantheistic unity in which all distinction is lost; it is simply the unity of the intelligence with the intelligible world, which is presupposed in their difference, and in the light of which alone their difference can be truly understood.

In abstracting from itself, as separate from and opposed to the object, in taking what is called a purely objective attitude, the intelligence has already implicitly shown that the object is not really a limit to it, or even something externally given to it. It could not take the point of view of the object if that point of view were not its own, if in the object it met with something which was absolutely foreign to it. That it can thus, in its utmost self-surrender, still maintain itself, that it can rise to a unity which is beyond its distinction from the object and its opposition to the object, is already the pledge that all such opposition and distinction may be overcome and resolved, or, in other words, that the world may be shown to be not merely the object but also the manifestation of intelligence. When, therefore, the mind seems to have freed itself of all content of its own, it is just then that it begins to find itself-i.e., to find the categories and forms of thought which constitute it -in the object. When it ceases to witness of itself, nature and history begin to witness of it. When it is silent, the "stones begin to cry out."

AIMS OF THE LOGIC
This doctrine, that we need only to cast aside all prepossessions, and take the world as it is, to find intelligence in it, is what Hegel attempts to prove in his 'Logic.' Commonly that 'Logic' is supposed to be the groundwork for something quite different,-for an attempt to construct nature a priori, and without reference to facts and experience. Now it is true that Hegel does there treat of the categories by which nature is made intelligible apart from the process of their application. This, however, is not because he is unaware that it is in the struggle to interpret experience that the intelligence is made conscious of its own forms. But he is of opinion that the categories must be considered in themselves and in their relation to each other, rather than in relation to the objects to which they are applied or in which they are realized, in order that it may be shown that there is law and order, unity in difference, in the mind as well as in the objects it knows.

Hegel, in short, is, in his 'Logic,' simply seeking to prove that these different categories are not a collection of isolated ideas, which we find in our minds and of which we apply now one, now another, as we might try one after another of a bunch of keys upon a number of isolated locks; he is seeking to prove that the categories are not instruments which the mind uses, but elements in a whole, or the stages in a complex process, which in its unity the mind is. For the mind has no key but itself to apply to nature; in spelling out the meaning of things, it can only move through the circle of its own self-consciousness in relation to them.

Its process is, therefore, a continuous process, with a beginning and end determined by the nature of self-consciousness itself. It is a method, and not merely an accidental succession of trials, that is needed to make the world scientifically intelligible, and in this method there is for the application of each category a time and place, which cannot be changed without confusion. "Where, indeed, shall logical order be found, if it be not in the succession of the categories, on which all logical method is based? From the first judgment of perception in which it is asserted that a particular object is, to the last scientific and philosophic comprehension of that object in its relations to other things and to the mind that knows it, there is a necessary sequence which cannot be inverted or changed. And our thorough comprehension of the world must depend on the order and completeness with which this process of thought is followed out in reference to it. Now this movement it is for logic, as the science of method, to trace "in abstracto" from category to category up to the idea of self-consciousness, which is the category of categories, the organic unity of all the other categories. Thus logic will reach at once a definition of intelligence as the principle of unity in the world, and a complete idea of method, as the process by which that principle of unity is to be traced out and discovered in all the manifold diversities of things.

THE UNSCIENTIFIC CONSCIOUSNESS
Why does Hegel begin with Being, and not, like Kant, with self-consciousness, if it be true that self-consciousness is the principle in which the explanation of all things is to be found? The answer to this question is implied in what has been already said. Hegel, no doubt, like Kant, holds that a relation to self-consciousness is implied in the first apprehension of an object, and that Being or Existence is essentially Being or existence for a self. But this relation of all existence, as object, to a conscious subject, is, in the first instance, implicit. In asserting that an object is, we do not assert that it is essentially related to other objects or to the intelligence. On the contrary, in our first way of looking at things, each object seems to be isolated from all the rest, as well as from the mind that knows it. The common consciousness at first seems to view the world as if it were a mere collection of things, one beside another, and a succession of events, one after another, without any vital or essential connection; nor does it regard the mind, to which these things and events are present, as related to them in any less external way than that in which they are related to each other. And though it might be shown that even in the external relation of things as in one space and time, a more essential connection of them to each other and to thought is presupposed, yet such connection, just because it is presupposed in the common consciousness, is not present to it.

For it, therefore, each thing stands by itself, without any but an accidental connection with anything else. Thus the common consciousness lives in abstraction, though it has never abstracted. It has never, indeed, needed to abstract, just because it has never been conscious, or at least never been clearly conscious, of the whole to which belong the different objects and elements which it isolates. Nor does science at first correct this isolating tendency of common thought; rather it seeks in its first movement to exaggerate that tendency, and press it to the utmost point of abstraction. For the first accidental connection of things in the experience of the individual must be seen to be accidental, and the first subjective associations produced by such experience in the individual mind must be broken, before the true relativity and connection of objects can be known. This is the meaning of the scientific discipline of which we have been speaking, - the discipline by which the mind, in Baconian phrase, is taught to renounce its "idols." The ordinary experimental methods destroy such false associations by what is really a practical development of the process of abstraction-i.e., by isolating the object or quality in question from the others with which it has been accidentally united.

OBJECTIVE DIALECTIC
Thus, then, the method of exclusion, negation, abstraction, in which an object is fixed by itself, and isolated from all its usual surroundings, has its place and value as the first step in scientific investigation. But that method may easily be misinterpreted, and made the basis of a false theory, if it be considered by itself; for then it will give rise to the doctrine that what a thing is, it is in itself, apart from all relation to other things or the mind. Such a doctrine is easily accepted by common-sense, for it is only its own isolating external way of thinking, brought to a clearer consciousness of itself. But, grasped by the understanding, and logically worked out to its consequences, it leads directly to the conclusion that the reality of things,-that which things are in themselves,-is unknown and unknowable. For all existence is but the manifestation, and all knowledge but the apprehension, of relations; and the attempt to strip a thing of its relations must therefore end in reducing it to a caput mortuum of abstraction of which nothing can be said. The real meaning of the scientific abstraction is thus perverted: for science sets a thing by itself, not that it may find out what it is apart from all relations, but that it may disclose its immanent or native relativity. It rejects all accidental and extraneous associations that may force its object to reveal its own intelligible nature-i.e., its essential relation to other things and to the mind.

Now Hegel only applies this same method to the forms of thought implied in all existence. He takes the categories, the ideas of Being, Existence, Cause, &c., each by itself, not in order to divorce each of these thoughts from all other thoughts, and from the mind which they constitute, but rather for the opposite reason,-in order to prove that they cannot be so divorced. In other words, his object is to show in relation to each of the categories that it is not merely capable of being associated or combined with the others, but that it has an immanent relativity or necessary connection with them, so that the other categories spring out of it the moment we attempt to confine it to itself. All subjective associations being destroyed, the pure objective association, the connection of idea with idea, which arises from, or, more strictly speaking, is their own nature, will necessarily show itself.

As the elasticity of the spring manifests itself only the more evidently, the more firmly it is pressed home to itself, so the more decisively a thought is fixed by abstraction in its isolated definite-ness, the more clear it becomes that it has, or rather is, a relativity,-i.e., that it has other thoughts implicit in itself. Ideas are not dead things, hut "have hands and feet." And the way in which such relativity springs out of a category, just when it is fixed to itself and isolated from all other categories, has already been indicated in what has been said of the "thing in itself." Isolate a thing from all its relations, and try to assert it by itself; at once you find that you have negated it, as well as its relations.

The thing in itself is nothing. The absolute or pure affirmation, just because it is absolute or pure, is its own negation. Referred to itself and itself only, it ceases to be itself; for its definition, that which made it itself, was its relation to that which was not itself. Thus we come upon the apparent paradox, that opposites are distinguished only when they are related, and that, if we carry the opposition to the point in which the relation ceases, the distinction ceases at the same time. And this leads us to the further result, that the relation to its opposite or negative is the one essential relation out of which a thought cannot be forced,-the relation which maintains itself when all extraneous associations are swept away. A thought is essentially the relation or the movement towards its opposite or negative; and this is proved by the fact that if it be absolutely isolated from that opposite, it immediately becomes indistinguishable from. it. Its connection with its opposite is, therefore, the first link in the chain of essential relativity that connects it with the whole body of other thoughts and with the intelligence.

UNITY OF OPPOSITES
"Being and not-Being are identical." This mysterious utterance of Hegel, round which so much controversy has waged, and which has seemed to many but a caprice of metaphysic run mad, may now be seen to have a serious meaning. It does not mean that Being and not-Being are not also distinguished, but it does mean that the distinction is not absolute, and that if it is made absolute, at that very moment it disappears. The whole truth, therefore, cannot be expressed either by the simple statement that Being and not-Being are identical, or by the simple statement that they are different. But the consideration of what these abstractions are in themselves when we isolate them from each other, just as a scientific man might isolate a special element in order to find the essential relativity or energy that lies in it, shows that their truth is not either their identity or their difference, but is their identity in difference.

But one who has apprehended this thought has already risen above the abstractions whose unity in difference he has seen. He is like the scientific man who has discovered an identity of principle connecting phenomena between which formerly he had seen no essential relation. By such discovery the mere external view of them as different things, related only by adjacent place or time, has disappeared, and the one phenomenon has become the counterpart or complementary aspect of the other. In like manner, the thinker who has fully seen into the correlativity of given opposites has reached a new attitude of thought in regard to them. They have become for him inseparable elements of a higher unity, which is now seen to be organic or vital Or the whole thought is seen to be a process through certain phases, each of which necessitated the other, and by the unity of which it-the whole thought-is constituted. Nor does the movement stop here. The whole thought reached in this way has again its opposite or negative, which it at once excludes and involves, and the process may be repeated in regard to it, with the result of reaching a still higher unity, a more complex thought, in which it and its opposite are elements. And so on, through ever-widening sweep of differentiation and integration, till the whole body of thought is seen in its organic unity and development,-every fiber of it alive with relation to the whole in which it is a constituent element.

THE THREEFOLD LOGIC
Has the process that has just been described a natural beginning and end? If it be true that self-consciousness includes or involves in it all the categories, it is obvious that the end is in the full definition of self-consciousness-i.e., the full analysis or differentiation of all the contents of the idea of self-consciousness, and their integration in that idea, as the unity of them all. And, on the other hand, its beginning must obviously be in the simplest and most abstract category, -which, as we have seen, is the category of Being,- the category by which a thing is referred, to itself, as if it had no relation to other things or to the mind. And the process which connects the beginning with the end is just the gradual revelation of these two relativities, -to things and to the mind, -which are implicit or presupposed, but not explicit or consciously present, in our first immediate attitude of thought. The first main division of logic, then, will have to do with the categories in which, as yet, relativity is not expressed; categories like Being, Quality, Quantity, which, though they involve, do not immediately suggest, any relation of the object to which they are applied to any other object.

The second main division will have to do with categories such as Essence and Existence, Force and Expression, Substance and Accident, Cause and Effect, which force us to go beyond the object with which we are dealing, and to connect it with other objects, or at least with something that is not immediately presented to us in the perception of it. And the last main division will have to do with categories, such as those of final cause and organic unity, by which the object is characterized as related to intelligence, or as having in it that self-determined nature of which the intelligence is the highest type; or to put it otherwise, it will have to do with categories by which the object is determined as essentially being, or having in it, an ideal unity which is reached and realized in and through all the manifoldness of its existence.

The general argument of the 'Logic,' when we pursue it through all these stages, therefore is this: that reality, which at first is present to us as the Being of things which are regarded as standing each by itself, determined in quality and quantity, but as having no necessary relations to each other, comes in the process of thought to be known as an endless aggregate of essentially related and transitory existences, each of which exists only as it determines and is determined by the others, according to universal laws, and finally, is discovered to lie in a world of objects, each and all of which exist only in so far as they exist for intelligence, and in so far as intelligence is revealed or realized in them.

And that this, indeed, is the movement of thought by which the reality of things is disclosed, is proved by the demonstration that categories of Being, used in the first attitude of thought, which corresponds to our simplest and most unsophisticated consciousness of things, when fully understood and reasoned out, necessarily lead us to the categories of Relation, employed in the second attitude of thought, which corresponds generally to the scientific or reflective consciousness; and that these in turn, when fully comprehended and pressed to their consequences, necessarily pass into the categories of Ideal Unity, or, as it is sometimes expressed, "the Concept," categories used in the third stage of consciousness, which corresponds to philosophy.

Science is the truth of common-sense, because the points of view from which the former considers the world, include and transcend the points of view from which it is regarded by the latter, and philosophy is the truth of science for the same reason, because it is science and something more. This something more, however, in each case is not merely something externally added to what went before; it is a vital growth from it, a transformation which takes place in it, by reason of latent forces that are already present. In this way self-consciousness - the last category or point of view - is seen to sum up and interpret all that went before; for while, like our first immediate consciousness of things, it is a direct assertion of independent Being-and while, like reflection, it includes difference and relation, it goes beyond both in so far as it expresses the integration of differences - a relation of elements which, though opposed, are yet identified.

THE PRE-SCIENTIFIC CONSCIOUSNESS
To attempt to prove these points in detail would be to work out again the whole process of the Hegelian Logic. The general account of it just given may, however, be made a little more distinct, if we consider more closely the process of knowledge as it advances through science to philosophy. It is obvious that the beginning of knowledge lies in taking things by themselves, as they lie before us in perception; in excluding all preconceptions, and accurately observing their qualities, and determining the quantity of each quality. Such observation is the first indispensable basis of science; but it can hardly yet itself be called science. It deserves the name, if at all, only where the observer, in his selection of facts to observe and his determination of their relative importance, is really guided by ideas of relation of which he is not definitely conscious; for scientific genius shows itself first in a kind of " instinct of reason," which anticipatively apprehends the fruitful direction for observation and experiment. But the pure observer soon finds that the qualities and quantities with which he deals are continually changing, and that the intelligence cannot find in them the fixed object which it seeks, unless it is able to go beyond them or beneath them to something that cannot be observed.

Such a deeper reality, such a principle of permanence in change, is already suggested to him by the fact that he does not find the quality and quantity of things to change altogether irrespectively of each other, but to be linked together in a certain mutual dependence, so that, with a little more or a little less of the same element, the quality of a thing is suddenly altered. But this, as a mere fact, is not any longer sufficient for him, when he has come to apprehend that change of quality is not an accidental or partial phenomenon, but that every quality as it exists is in process of changing. Thus the final experience of that mode of thought, which fixes each finite thing to itself and takes it to be only what it is in itself, is that such things can quite as truly be said "not to be" as "to be." Their being is a "becoming" or change. Unless, therefore, we can get beyond this continual flux of unsubstantial things, this endless change of phenomena, the intelligence is denuded of its objects, and falls back upon itself in skepticism.

This, in fact, is the first natural effect of the growing consciousness that appearances-things as they are immediately present to us for observation- are essentially inconstant and fluctuating; for by this experience all that common-sense held to be reality is discerned to be unreal, and as yet nothing else had disclosed itself to take the place of that which has disappeared. In this skepticism, however, science is born, -science, of which the essential characteristic is to recognize that things are not as they seem, but that beyond and through the seeming we can apprehend that which really is, the one force through the manifold expression, the abiding law through the fleeting phenomena. The scientific or reflective consciousness, therefore, may be said to begin with the negation of the immediate reality of finite things, and to aim at finding some deeper ground or principle in reference to which they may be conceived to have a kind of secondary or mediated reality.

THE SCIENTIFIC CONSCIOUSNESS
This scientific consciousness has, however, a certain growth or development within itself by which its first antagonistic or dualistic mode of thought is gradually transcended and transmuted. And as in the first stage of thought, which began with purely affirmative determination of things, - as if they existed in themselves,independent of all relation, - there was a continual progress toward the recognition of the negative or relative aspect of them, the aspect in which they are seen to be essentially finite and transitory; so in this second stage, which begins with the absolute contrast of real and apparent, substance and accident, there is a continual progress toward an ever clearer apprehension of the essential connection of these two opposite aspects of things, and finally, to the discerning of the unity that binds them to each other. At first, as is natural, the opposition is stated most strongly, so strongly that it seems to involve a denial of all relations whatever; as when, in the early Eleatic school, the "one" was abstractly opposed to the "many," which was regarded as purely apparent and unreal But it was soon recognized that, by this absolute separation, both terms are deprived of their meaning.

If the many, the changing, the phenomenal, is unreal in the sense that it contains its negative in itself, equally unreal is the one, the permanent, the substance, which is abstractly opposed to these, and which is, in fact, nothing but that negative positively expressed. Plato, and still more Aristotle, found that what was wanted was not "the one beyond the many " merely, but "the one in the many." And the progress of science up to the present day has been a continuous advance towards the reconciliation of the two terms in a conception of the inner reality or principle of things, which should make that reality or principle the complete explanation, and nothing but the explanation, of their external appearances and changing phenomena. Looking at this progressive movement of the scientific consciousness, we can understand how it is that modern science, though it has not itself got beyond the dualism of phenomenal and real, yet takes up so marked an attitude of antagonism to the more decided dualism of earlier days, and is prone to denounce as " metaphysical " what is really just an initial stage of its own mode of thought.

Thus, for example, Comte condemns the reference of phenomena to "forces" and "substances," which are, he maintains, either pure negations or the abstract repetitions of the phenomena they are adduced to explain. Science, in his view, should confine itself to the investigation of the "laws" of the resemblance, coexistence, and succession of phenomena, these laws being regarded simply as the generalized restatement of the phenomena themselves. In thus speaking, however, Comte is really admitting what he seems to deny. Such "generalized restatement " is obviously something more than a simple reaffirmation of the phenomena themselves. A law is at once the negation and the reaffirmation of the phenomena that fall under it: it is contrasted with them, as permanent with changing, as unity with multiplicity, and yet it is one with them, as the principle by reference to which alone they are lifted above mere appearances, or illusions of the moment.

DEFECTS OF SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT
The defect, however, of this whole scientific mode of thought is that, while it goes beyond the immediate phenomena to seek for an explanation of them, it is never able to find a complete explanation. For the principle, to which the phenomena are thus referred, never exhausts their meaning, but rather itself presupposes those very phenomena. In other words, the law, which is supposed to explain the phenomena, though necessarily distinguished from them, is essentially related to them, and, in its turn, looks for explanation to them. This double aspect of the idea of law sometimes leads writers who are not clearly conscious of their own categories into a curious inconsistency of statement. For, while at one time they tell us that the law is merely the generalized expression of the phenomena, as if their translation into the form of law were something indifferent and unnecessary, at another time they declare with equal emphasis that we know the phenomena only when we know their laws, as if the law were not merely a generalized repetition of the phenomena, but the central principle, in reference to which alone the true value and significance of the phenomena can be known.

THE SCIENCE OF PHILOSOPHY
The key to the difficulty, however, is found when it is seen that the scientific mode of thought, though necessary as a stage of knowledge, has an essential imperfection clinging to it, which can be corrected only by going beyond it to the philosophical mode of thought, or what Hegel calls the Begriff. In scientific reflection we have always two terms that are essentially related, and in one of which the explanation of the other is sought. Yet, just because of this essential relation, the explanation can never be complete. The categories used are such as substance and accident, force and expression, inner and outer being, cause and effect. In each of these cases we have an essential relation of two terms of such a kind that, though the explanation of the second term is always sought in the first, yet the first term has no significance except in relation to the second.

We have, therefore, in employing such categories, necessarily involved ourselves in a self-contradiction, the self-contradiction of explaining everything by a term, which yet is essentially relative to that which is to be explained. Thus we explain the accidents by referring them to the substance; but the substance has no meaning apart from the accidents. Nor does it make any difference if, instead of such a reciprocity of terms, we have a series, as when we say that the cause explains the effect, but is itself to be explained by the effect of another cause; for this further need of explanation simply means that the cause does not fully explain its effect. Its difference from the effect, and its essential relation to it, is the very reason that forces us to seek explanation of it in another cause. We have therefore, in this and every similar movement of thought, a contradiction which needs to be solved: for that which is set up in opposition to the relative as absolute, and, indeed, as its absolute, is yet itself correlative with it, and so again must be recognized as not being absolute. Those who deal in such categories, therefore, fall into a kind of fluctuation or alternation of language, of which the above-mentioned uncertainty in regard to law is one instance. Nor is this fluctuation a mere accident. The category that rules their thoughts forces them to contradict themselves, as it turns first one and then the other of its sides to the light.

For the most part, however, they do not bring together the different aspects of their thought, and hence they do not feel the difficulty, or the need of solving it by a higher category. Often, indeed, this unconsciousness may be an advantage in a work, which requires rather the thorough and unhesitating application of a category than the perception of its limits. For, as the higher categories have their full value, only when they come as the solution of difficulties which arise out of the lower categories, so the philosophical explanation of things, by means of the former, can only be legitimately arrived at as the last reinterpretation of the scientific explanation of them by means of the latter. But, on the other hand, the unresolved dualism, which is left by the application of the scientific categories, shows the necessity of a reinterpretation of the results of science by other higher categories, as it also shows that this reinterpretation-which constitutes the peculiar work of philosophy is no mere useless or extraneous addition to science, but a necessary development of it.

Comte, indeed, as we have seen, has an easier method of dealing with the difficulty, by simply denying altogether the distinction between real and phenomenal, between fact and law, which gives rise to it. But this, if it were taken as meaning what it expresses, would be no true solution of the problem, but simply a recurrence to that first sensuous consciousness for which the opposition of seeming and reality did not exist, a consciousness which must be disturbed and overthrown, before even the dawn of science is possible. For the doubt and wonder in which science arises, is the doubt and wonder that things are not what they seem; and if it is possible, again to find the reality in the seeming, it must be by a reconciliation of those opposites, and not simply by obliterating the opposition.

Where, then, are we to find such a complete reconciliation? The highest conception of the world which science presents to us is the conception of a multiplicity of substances, acting and reacting on each other, and by their action and reaction producing continual changes in each other according to unchanging laws. Each substance, thus, by the condition of its being, stands in relation to that which is opposed to it, and which gives rise to changes in it; yet each maintains itself in change, in so far as it changes according to a law-i.e., it has a definite relation to the other substance, which manifests itself in its change. In this way of looking at things, however, there is a certain ambiguity and inconsistency. For, while we start with the idea of isolated substances which have an existence of their own, and which change only because they are brought into relation to each other, it appears as we go on that what maintains itself is the law of the relation itself, apart from which the substances have no existence whatever.

Substantiality and Relativity are thus seen to be not two ideas, but one, and the truth is to be found not in either separately but in their union; which means that nothing can be said to be substantial in the sense of having an existence independent of relation, but only in the sense of including its relativity in its own being. In other words, nothing is substantial except in so far as it is a subject or self that maintains itself in change, because its change is determined by its own nature, and is indeed only the necessary manifestation of that nature. To speak of different substances, which yet have no independent nature apart from their action and reaction on each other, is a manifest contradiction; for the necessity to which, according to this view, the different substances are supposed to be subjected, is itself the only true substance. Or what we really have before ns in such a reciprocity is not a duality of things externally related, but a unity which expresses itself and maintains itself in duality. The real substance has to be sought for, not in the two things taken separately, but in the principle which divides, and at the same time unites, them.

THE TRUTH OF NECESSITY IS FREEDOM
Determination by another is thus always ultimately to be explained as self-determination, though we may have to seek the self in question somewhere else than in the things which were at first taken to be substantial, but which may turn out to be mere "moments" or elements in some higher existence. This is what Hegel means by saying that the "truth of necessity is freedom." Necessity exists for any thing or being only in so far as it is determined by another, and if it has no life or movement of its own which is not so determined, it in itself has no reality whatever that should make us regard it as an individual thing or substance at all: it is but one side or phase of the existence of something else, which is not determined by another, but by itself.

The ultimate reality of things, therefore, which the common consciousness seeks in their purely unrelated or independent being, and which science seeks in their existence as essentially related to each other, is only to be found in what we may call their ideal character, as unities of correlative differences, or unities which manifest themselves in difference yet in this difference are still one with themselves. Thus that alone can truly be called a reality that maintains and realizes itself in a process of differentiation and reintegration of differences. "Nothing really exists which is not determined and relative,- nothing which is not in a process of becoming or change." This was proved by the first stage of the 'Logic,' which carried us from the immediate consciousness of things to science.

"Nothing really exists which is not self-determined and self-related, which has not a self that it maintains through all its changes." This is proved by the second stage of the 'Logic,' which carries us from the first scientific consciousness of the opposition-of appearances and reality, to the perception that the real manifests itself in the appearance and its change: or, what is the same thing, the perception that what we call the real is fundamentally ideal. For, whereas to the reflective consciousness the ideal seems to he an abstract law or principle, which is different from the facts, or represents only one side of the facts, through which we apprehend it, it is now seen that this ideal unity is the fact of facts, the principle from which they all spring, and to which they return. Reality lies, not, as common-sense supposes, in the mere individual taken by itself - nor, as science seems to teach, in the mere particular which is related to other particulars; it lies in the relation, or principle of relation, itself, in the universal which differentiates or particularizes itself and yet is one with itself in its particularity. Or, to express all in a word, "the real is the rational or intelligible;" i.e., it is that which is capable of being thoroughly understood by the intelligence, just because it has in it the essential nature of the intelligence or self-consciousness, as a unity which is one with itself, not by the absence of difference, but rather by means of the difference, which it at once asserts and overcomes.

DEFECT OF MONADISM
The idea which we are now examining may be illustrated by the Leibnitzian conception of the world as a universe of monads, each of which is itself a world. Each monad or real substance, on this view, is a microcosm, which ideally, or in its perceptions, takes the whole life of the world into itself, and yet, in spite of all this ideal relativity, is not really determined by anything but itself. Each is thus in itself a reflection of the whole, while yet it remains a complete whole in itself, developing entirely for itself in absolute freedom through all the changes of its purely inward life, though these changes correspond exactly to the outward movements of the great world without it. In this way, by the distinction of the real and ideal aspects of the monad, Leibnitz thinks to avoid the difficulty of combining in it the opposite conceptions of relativity and independent being, universality and individuality, necessity or determination by others and freedom or determination by itself.

This distinction is, however, really an evasion of the difficulty, and Leibnitz himself is obliged to give it up in relation to God, the monad of monads, in whom, as the absolute unity of ideality and reality, he finds the ground of the harmony between the perceptions of each monad and the existence of the rest, and the reason why, notwithstanding their independence, they form parts of one world. Thus, though in relation to each other these monads may be free, in relation to God they have no freedom or self-determination whatever.

At this point, however, we come upon a great difficulty that arises in connection with the conception of reality that has just been presented. So soon as we are driven to recognize that reality can be found in that and that only which has a principle of self-determination in itself, we seem forced to recognize that the only reality is God. Though, therefore, the necessity of nature may have been shown to be freedom, yet it would seem that there is room for only one freedom in the world, the freedom of the absolute Being, which reduces all other things and beings to his mere determinations or the modes of his attributes; and the only other alternative to this would seem to be a monadism which isolates each substance from all the others, and absolutely confines it to itself, and which leaves room neither for ideal nor for real relations between it and anything else. In order to escape from this dilemma we would require what at first must seem to be an absolute contradiction-viz., such an idea of the absolute unity to which we are obliged to refer all existence, as should yet leave room for a real freedom and independence, a real self-centered life, in other beings than itself. And if such a conception is impossible, we do not seem to have gained much more by referring all things to an absolute subject, than if we had referred them merely to an absolute substance.

THE IDEA OF SELF-DETERMINATION
Now it is the main work of the third part of the 'Logic' to develop such an idea out of the simple conception of the monad or self-determining principle, which was the result reached by the second part of it. Here, as in the other cases, we must confine ourselves to indicating the general thought which runs through this development. The key to the difficulty was partly seen by Leibnitz himself, when he pointed out that a true organism is a unity of organisms, organic in all its parts. The life of the body is not a principle that dominates over dead members, and uses them as instruments to realize itself; it is all all the members, so that each of them in turn may be regarded as means and end to the others. There is, no doubt, a unity of the whole that subordinates all the parts, but it only subordinates them, so to speak, by surrendering or imparting itself to them, and giving to them a certain independent life, -a life which, though embraced in a wider circle, is still centered in itself. Now a self-determining principle, as such, is necessarily of this sort, it is not like a law that is imposed upon a foreign matter, for its only matter is itself.

In determining, it determines itself; in producing differences, it produces itself in them. Its assertion or manifestation of itself is, therefore, in a sense, a denying of itself, a giving of itself away. Its life is a dying to live. It is true that we must add that this negation of itself can never be absolute. In the differences and opposition the unity must be maintained. The independence of the separate organs in the body must not be such as to break their connection with each other, and with the unity of the whole. But this connection is maintained, not by an external subordination, but by the completeness with which the life of the whole is communicated to the parts, so that, to realize themselves, they must become subservient to it.

In like manner a world in which the central principle is a self-determining Being, while, in one aspect of it, it seems to be a unity in which no room is left for difference, in another aspect of it breaks into an infinite number of fragments, each of which seems to be centered in itself. It is not like the universe of Spinoza, in which every difference of mind is lost in the abstract attribute of infinite intelligence, and every distinction of matter in the abstract attribute of infinite extension; it is a universe in which "every thought is a truth, and every particle of dust an organization;" a macrocosm made up of microcosms, which is all in every part.

"Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies;
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower,
but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is."

Under such a conception the usual antithesis of individualism and pantheism fails us, and our idea of the world seems to involve both at once, or to fall into a kind of alternation between them, such as is found in the monadism of Leibnitz, or in the later theory of Schelling, in which all the differences of things were said to be "not qualitative but merely quantitative," i.e., to be differences that from the highest point of view might be neglected as unessential. This, however, were to forget that though the organism is organic in all its parts, yet these parts have their specific determination, and that it is through this specific determination that they form one whole. It were to forget that though a self-determining principle necessarily is present in its determinations, and gives them thus a certain independence, yet that they in turn are limited in themselves, and only maintain themselves as the principle realizes itself in them; or, in other words, as they in turn surrender themselves to the life of the whole. Their capacity of so surrendering themselves, in short, is the measure of their reality. Thus the unity as a self-determining principle is in the differences, but it is also in their negation, by which they pass beyond themselves as individuals and so return into the unity.

IDEA OF ORGANIC UNITY
"The reality is the universal, which goes out of itself, particularizes itself, opposes itself to itself, that it may reach the deepest and most comprehensive unity with itself." Such expressions seem to be breaking through the very limits of language, by continual self-contradiction ; yet they only distinctly analyze a thought which we continually use without analysis when we speak of a self, of self-consciousness or of self-determination. And as it has been shown that the "truth of necessity is freedom," we are compelled by the very development of the scientific conception of law to recognize that the ultimate interpretation of things must be in harmony with this idea. This, as we have seen, is equivalent to saying that the world is an organic unity. By the organic unity of the world, however, it is not meant merely that the world as a whole is to be interpreted on the analogy of the living body, or of a plant or animal. Such an organism only imperfectly realizes the idea of which we are speaking; and if the world were organic in this fashion, it would not be a self-determined whole, in which all differences were brought back to unity.

Or, even if we suppose all the differences of the world as an objective system could be brought to unity by means of such an idea, the thought or consciousness for which it exists would be left out; for the animal, though an organic unity, is not such a unity for itself. It probably never rises above the stage of feeling, in which the self is not yet clearly distinguished from, and related to, the world without. The supreme difference of subject and object is wanting to, or imperfectly expressed in, its life, and therefore there is not in it the possibility of the supreme reconciliation of intelligence with itself. If, therefore, the conception of an ideal or self-determining principle, with which we begin this third stage of the Logic, be fully developed, it will be seen to find its final form and expression only in self-consciousness, as the unity in difference of subject and object, self and not-self; for here only have we an ideal principle which is conscious of itself, and, consequently, complete in itself; here only have we a principle which develops to the utmost difference and opposition against itself, and yet returns into transparent unity with itself.

THE ABSOLUTE IDEA
This may be seen more clearly if we consider what the life of self-consciousness is. In the first place, self-consciousness presupposes consciousness, i.e., it is a consciousness of self in opposition, yet in relation, to a not-self. Yet in this distinction a higher unity is presupposed; for the self can be conscious of itself as so distinguished and related, only in so far as it overreaches the distinction between itself and its object. Thus beneath the conscious duality of self and not-self there is an unconscious unity, which reveals itself in the fact that the whole life of an intelligence is an effort to overcome its own dualism, - in knowledge to find itself, in action to realize itself, in an object or a world of objects, which at first presents itself as a stranger and even an enemy. For, as we have seen in our review of the previous stages of the 'Logic,' the world for the immediate consciousness of man is merely a world of things unrelated even to each other; and even when science so far overcomes this first consciousness, so as to discover law or relation in them, yet this relativity is not yet unity, not yet the pure transparent identity-in-difference of self-consciousness.

Hence the intelligence cannot yet find itself in the object, or, what is the same thing, cannot see the essential relation of the object to itself. "When, however, we become conscious that the truth of necessity is freedom, or, in other words, that the reality of things is to be found in the ideal unity or self-determining principle realized in them,-the mask of strangeness is taken from the face of nature, and we begin to find in it the same spiritual principle which we are conscious of in ourselves. The world, however it may seem to oppose, is really the field for the realization of intelligence; if it seems to resist us, it is because we are not yet at one with ourselves. For "all things must work together" for him whose nature is reason, and whose activity is only to realize himself as reason-i.e., to realize the spiritual principle, which is at the same time his own nature and the nature of things.

The whole theoretical and practical movement of self-consciousness thus culminates in what Hegel calls "the absolute idea" -i.e., in the idea of a self-consciousness which manifests itself in the difference of self and not-self, that through this difference, and by overcoming it, it may attain the highest unity with itself. This, the last category, contains and implies all the other categories; and, in another way, it shows itself to be implied in each and all of them. For what the whole 'Logic' has proved is, that if we take the categories seriously, abstracting from all subjective associations, and fixing our attention on their objective dialectic, or, in other words, if we leave the categories to define themselves by the necessary movement of thought through w