Page:Ethical Theory of Hegel (1921).djvu/24

 nothing in the real world, how can the result give us a content in any way like the trans-subjective world of things? Moreover, how can the exponent of such a view know that the laws of thinking are subjective and its results objective? Such knowledge implies independent acquaintance with the real world in order to compare it point for point with the content of knowledge. The argument need not be elaborated farther: it is clear that this view of logic is so far from being free from epistemology and metaphysics that it is based on a view of knowledge which separates knowledge from things, and it has sufficient information about reality to distinguish the laws of the latter from the modes and principles of the content of thought. This contention, however, by no means settles the question. Perhaps if we give up the untenable dualism between the content of knowledge and the object known, we may devise a distinction within the content of knowledge between subjective modes of organizing the material apprehended and objective principles of things. But such a distinction, although a genuine one when regarded in a certain way, is an abandonment of the original scope and task of logic. It gives up the problem of analysing the forms of knowing as a whole, and breaks up the total content into two sections without exposing what they have in common. If logic identifies its object with one of these divisions there remains room for another logic, more faithful to its primary duty, which will lay bare the principles involved in any apprehended content, whether existing in external nature or not.

Hegel’s logic claims this larger task. If logic is to maintain itself as the science of the principles of the content of knowledge, it must cease to diminish its stature to the measure of the merely subjective, and must advance to an analysis of the structural principles of a thought which can apprehend any object. But it is obvious that such an analysis is metaphysical as well as logical. It is conversant not only with the principles of thinking, but also with those of that which is thought; and it cannot but seek to determine the conditions of an intelligible world, the only world with which we have any concern. Naturally, if reality is identified with