Page:Ethical Theory of Hegel (1921).djvu/59

 way illusion—if substance is the whole truth. But against this we have to set the reality of the movement; for to deny the movement is to annihilate the accidents and substance along with them. Substance, therefore, is not indeterminate; since it acts it must have within it principles of action, means for the production of differences. What are we to make of this antinomy? The first side, the indeterminate aspect, is the outer show, the appearance which substance wears when it is not taken with the light of the notion upon it; and it is the vacuity into which inadequate thought must retire. The second aspect, the inward determinateness of substance, is a statement of the nature of substance in the knowledge of that which it becomes in the upward trend of thought. Substance must be determinate, but at its own proper level this determinateness is hidden and not made open. Therein lies the underived character. The charge, then, is no gratuitous one; it voices the demand that substance should show what shape it has, and insists that substance seems to be a featureless abyss merely because it is in shadow.

The point may be put in other words. In any ordered world of thought which has risen to the level of substance, change and process find a place. And such change has an explanation. But if the first principle, substance itself, contain no such explanation, then beyond it there lie forces and powers which it cannot control, and which are alien to it. But the first principle, substance, at the same time claims supremacy and completeness; it itself is the sole truth: and hence it falls into contradiction with itself. Substance may reconcile the discrepancy only by genuinely accepting the determinateness of its accidents as its own proper content. It will then leave nothing standing beyond it to bind it, and it will have a right to claim as its own those powers which it asserts to be concealed within it.

It is this step that the notion has taken; it has brought into harmony the implicit nature and the overt appearance. The first step appears to be one of renunciation; the supreme has limited itself in each of its members. But that step, though essential, is only one side of a complete act; for the principle thereby gains the whole as its content, and all that is falls within its scope. Growth, we have been told, is not mere aggregation, it is creation. And the nature of