Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/116

 102 CEITICAL NOTICES : notions as such, and itself is the movement from one to another. And this is done when the notions ' pass into ' one another " (pp. 265 and 266). But "how exactly is the process brought about ? What starts the movement? There is only one answer the existence of opposition, discord, contradiction. All change, we may say, generally is due to disturbance of equilibrium within a given whole. ... It is so in all concrete human experience. . . . Hence the antithesis between the fulness of its [mind's] completed life, and the insufficiency of any one special mode of it, both creates other modes in which it must realise itself and com- pels it to pass from a less sufficient to a more complete form of experience. This opposition, which operates perpetually through- out concrete experience, and is absolutely necessary to it ... is the motive force which initiates and maintains the process of experience, and produces the continual conversion of conscious attitude (Umkehrung) which appears throughout it. And the process in Logic is similarly constituted " (pp. 266, 267). But this diversity of experience in the midst of its identity, this plurality in the bosom of unity, is what is meant by " negation " (p. 272). "Identity only has significance, only is by being set against difference ; and difference has no meaning except in oppo- sition to an identity. ... to be conscious of self necessitates distinction, while to be conscious of self asserts an identity through- out the whole process" (p. 272). Hence "the method from first to last is at once synthetic and analytic ; the difference between the moments is one of emphasis only. In the first negation we estab- lish more directly by analysis of the original identity, a diversity implied in it. In the second we insist more particularly on the synthesis of the elements ostensibly opposed, and bring out their unity " (p. 276). Dr. Baillie thinks that the term " ' Dialectic ' can hardly be said to exhaust the meaning of the method," because "the be- ginning is established by the method, and the beginning is not itself a negative " ; because " the negative is only one aspect of the content; every notion is likewise positive"; and because "the process as a whole is a development, and a development is at least as much positive as negative " (p. 286). This criticism of the term by which Hegel generally preferred to characterise his method is valid only if the term is taken more narrowly than Hegel took it. For Hegel dialectic was das Fassen des Entgegen- gesetzten in seiner Einheit (Werke, Zweite Auf., iii., 42). The recognition of opposition and contrariety did not exhaust the function of Hegel's dialectic. This he regarded Kant's mistake in his conception of dialectic. Kant held fast by the abstractly negative side of the dialectic and in consequence reached the curious result that reason is not capable of knowing the rational (Werke, iii., 41, 42). Hegel objected strenuously to this con- clusion, and denied the premiss on which it rests, namely, that dialectic is merely negative. Dr. Baillie takes dialectic to be