Page:Journal of Speculative Philosophy Volumes 1 and 2.djvu/13

5 identity and distinction likewise. This is the speculative standpoint in its completeness. It not only possesses speculative content, but is able to evolve a speculative system likewise. It is not only conscious of the principles, but of their method, and thus all is transparent.

To suppose that this may be made so plain that one shall see it at first sight, would be the height of absurdity. Doubtless far clearer expositions can be made of this than those found in Plato or Proelus, or even in Fichte and Hegel; but any and every exposition must incur the same difficulty, viz: The one who masters it must undergo a thorough change in his innermost. The "Palingenesia" of the intellect is as essential as the "regeneration of the heart," and is at bottom the same thing, as the mystics teach us. But this great difference is obvious superficially: In religious regeneration it seems the yielding up of the self to an alien, although beneficent, power, while in philosophy it seems the complete identification of one's self with it.

He, then, who would ascend into the thought of the best thinkers the world has seen, must spare no pains to elevate his thinking to the plane of pure thought. The completest discipline for this may be found in Hegel's Logic. Let one not despair, though he seem to be baffled seventy and seven times; his earnest and vigorous assault is repaid by surprisingly increased strength of mental acumen which he will be assured of, if he tries his powers on lower planes after his attack has failed on the highest thought. These desultory remarks on the Speculative, may be closed with a few illustrations of what has been said of the negative.

I. Everything must have limits that mark it off from other things, and these limits are its negations, in which it ceases.

II. It must likewise have qualities which distinguish it from others, but these likewise are negatives in the sense that they exclude it from them. Its determining by means of qualities is the making it not this and not that, but exactly what it is. Thus the affirmation of anything is at the same time the negation of others.

III. Not only is the negative manifest in the above general and abstract form. but its penetration is more specific. Everything has distinctions from others in general, but also from its other. Sweet is opposed not only to other properties in general, as white, round, soft, etc., but to its other, or sour. So, too, white is opposed to black, soft to hard, heat to cold, etc., and in general a positive thing to a negative thing. In this kind of relative, the negative is more essential, for it seems to constitute the intimate nature of the opposites, so that each is reflected in the other.

IV. More remarkable are the appearances of the negative in nature. The element fire is a negative which destroys the form of the combustible. It reduces organic substances to inorganic elements, and is that which negates the organic. Air is another negative element. It acts upon all terrestrial elements; upon water, converting it into invisible vapor; upon metals, reducing them to earths through corrosion—eating up iron to form rust, rotting wood into mould—destructive or negative alike to the mineral and vegetable world, like fire, to which it has a speculative affinity. The grand type of all negatives in nature, such as air and fire, is Time, the great devourer, and archetype of all changes and movements in nature. Attraction is another appearance of the negative. It is a manifestation in some body of an essential connection with another which is not it; or rather it is an embodied self-contradiction: "that other (the sun) which is not me (the earth) is my true being." Of course its own being is its own negation, then.

Thus, too, the plant is negative to the inorganic—it assimilates it; the animal is negative to the vegetable world.

As we approach these higher forms or negation, we see the negative acting against itself, and this constitutes a process. The food that life requires, which it negates in the process of digestion, and assimilates, is, in the life process, again negated, eliminated from the organism, and replaced by new elements. A negation is made, and this is again negated.