Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/517

 LOGIC. 495 give an abbreviated presentation of that which the Doc- trine of Objective and Absolute Spirit develops in richer articulation. (a) Logic considers the Idea in the abstract element of thought, only as it is thought, and not yet as it is intuited, nor as it thinks itself; its content is the truth as it is with- out a veil in and for itself, or God in his eternal essence before the creation of the world. Unlike common logic, which is merely formal, separating form and content, speculative logic, which is at the same time ontology or metaphysics, treats the categories as real relations, the forms of thought as forms of reality : as thought and thing are the same, so logic is the theory of thought and of being in one. Its three principal divisions are entitled Bemg, Essence, the Concept. The first of these discusses quality, quantity, and measure or qualitative quantum. The second considers essence as such, appearance, and (essence appearing or) actuality, and this last, in turn, in the moments, sub- stantiality, causality, and reciprocity. The third part is divided into the sections, subjectivity (concept, judgment, syllogism), objectivity (mechanism, chemism, teleology), and the Idea (life, cognition, the absolute Idea). As a specimen of the way in which Hegel makes the concept pass over into its opposite and unite with this in a synthesis, it will be sufficient to cite the famous beginning of the Logic. How must the absolute first be thought, how first defined ? Evidently as that which is absolutely without presupposition. The most general concept which remains after abstracting from every determinate content of thought, and from which no further abstraction is possible, the most indeterminate and immediate concept, is pure being. As without quality and content it is equivalent to nothing. In thinking pure being we have rather cogitated nothing; but this in turn cannot be retained as final, but passes back into being, for in being thought it exists as a some- thing thought. Pure being and pure nothing are the same, although we mean different things by them ; both afe absolute indeterminateness. The transition from being to nothing and from nothing to being is becoming. Becom- ingis the unity, and lience the truth ofJbpthj„ When the