Page:Ethical Theory of Hegel (1921).djvu/30

 In the first place, the principles of thought are interconnected. For a genuine empiricism the world is not a whole but a series of numberless parts—parts in no wise connected with one another. The series can be a unity for an apprehending consciousness only if it is thought under principles which hold it together and connect its various portions. Every principle of thought has this function, and the task of knowledge is to discover them. Kant, as we have seen, gave these principles a subjective turn, and supposed that they were foisted upon the material of knowledge, and that the mind made its objects. Hegel is quite aware of the activity of thought here, but he recognizes the objective side also. The laws and principles in question are those which constitute the world; they are those which things must contain if they are to form an intelligible world at all—and what is not intelligible is not a world. But it is not enough that there should be a variety of laws discernible in the objects of knowledge. A number of separate principles would give us, not one world, but as many worlds as there are special forms of unity. Moreover these worlds would be absolutely out of relation to one another, and could have no commerce. Moreover, they could not be known to one and the same mind; indeed, to speak more accurately, we should have no right to call them all worlds, for to be a world is to possess a special type of unity, and ex hypothesi the types are all different. Mind is a unity, intelligence is the same in principle in all its activities, and all the objects it can know must belong inherently to the one scheme of things. If the objective anarchy which we have suggested were the case, we should need as many minds as there were principles in order to apprehend them, and the mind would be shattered into fragments. If the mind is to be a unity, its object must also be a unity and constitute one world. But the various portions of the content of knowledge can form a whole only if unifying principles themselves cohere; for the principles are the unity of the world. That is to say, what Kant calls the synthetic a priori principles of knowledge, or what we may call the constitutive principles of what is known, are linked together and form a rational and coherent whole. Their own inter-connexion is, on the one hand, the essence of the unity of the intelligible world, and, on the other, of the rationality of the