Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/339

 HEGELIAN CATEGORIES IN THE HEGELIAN ARGUMENT. 325 and of Necessity), or notional (in the Judgment of the Notion). A bronze, for example, is brown, is useful as a lamp-holder and is also beautiful. Jiut however unessential or essential the resemblances, and however few or many, they inevitably connect the one individual with others. It should be added, that these sections on the judgment are greatly confused by Hegel's Homeric tendency to lose the thread of his argu- ment while following out the labyrinthine turns of a figure of speech. His effort is bo complete the analogy of the individual, as complex of shared qualities, with the judgment, as composed of universal and particular, by referring to every form of proposition and syllogism. His procedure leads to petty distinctions, to meaningless refinements, and to actual inconsistencies. The term 'particular,' for example, readily applicable to the distinguishing or 'unlike' feature of an individual, has no meaning as the name of a minor proposition. Similarly, the term 'universal,' after doing duty as synonym for 'like,' ought not of a sudden to gain the meaning 'absolute'. The study of this first division of Hegel's argument, in all three books of the Logic, suggests, finally, the questions : Is the theory which he opposes ever seriously applied ? Has anybody ever believed or thought that ultimate reality is identical with any single quality or composite of qualities ? It may readily be admitted that Hegel's illustrations are, indeed, extreme examples of the single and isolated reality. But though nobody claims for any single quality of a concrete thing, or for the complex thing itself, the position of final reality, it is clear that dualistic materialism regards matter as co-existing with spirit and yet as possessing ultimate reality ; and that dualistic spiritualism assigns to spirit this same anomalous and impossible position of an ultimate reality which has some other reality external to it. In opposition to the doctrine of ultimate reality as limited, Hegel has now a second argument. It may be stated thus : 2. Ultimate Reality is not one limited reality among others, for every such reality is dependent on others. In the sections already outlined, Hegel has shown that because every limited reality is itself and not another, and because every complex is like and unlike others, therefore no such limited quality or thing can be looked on as final reality. He now goes on to show, that the limited reality, besides implying others, is dependent on them, that is, of necessity connected with them. In other words, no supposedly independent reality can make good its claim to independence. Not only does every quality or thing imply the existence of others, but it is actually connected with these others, inextricably bound up with them and dependent on them. For every thing or individual is acknowledged to be either a cause or an effect : as such, however, it simply is not independent, since by virtue of its being cause or effect it is 'connected.' In Hegel's own words: 1 "Cause and effect are conceived 1 Encycl, 153 3 ; cf. Werke, iv., 218 2.