Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/189

 HEGEL'S TREATMENT OF THE SUBJECTIVE NOTION. 173 urinations are balanced. We might then expect exactly what happens that in the following triad one of these two sides is developed in the thesis, and that this, being imperfect and contradictory when taken by itself, requires the further development of the other side in the antithesis. (The Sub- jective Notion is, of course, the thesis, and the Objective Notion the antithesis, in the Doctrine of the Notion.) The reason that the Universal Notion as such can be introduced here and not before is as follows. In Likeness and Unlikeness we found that it might be said of everything that it was like everything else in some respects and unlike it in others. But what we did not say there was that by these likenesses and unlikenesses its whole nature could be expressed. For in that category one of the earliest in the Doctrine of Essence the distinction between essence and appearance was not removed. And these distinctions of similarity and dissimilarity, like all other relations, belonged to appearance only. Behind them was the essence, a Ding an sich, which was neither like or unlike anything else, but entered into no relations at all. Now the conception of the Notion as such is that the whole nature of things can be expressed by means of general qualities. And this cannot be the case so long as the qualities are looked on as mere appearances, dependent on an essence whose nature they do not express. It is for this reason that Hegel does not speak of Universals till we reach the Doctrine of the Notion. Before that things were seen to have common qualities, but this was only an external, though necessary characteristic, not the expression of the thing's own nature. Now, however, this is changed. We saw in Reciprocity that a thing has no inner nature, except its outside nature, which had been previously determined to consist of general qualities. If this result is itself imperfect, and some sort of inner nature will have eventually to be admitted, yet as against the mere Ding an sich of the Doctrine of Essence the result is final and conclusive. And so we come to the conclusion that we can know a thing thoroughly by predicating a sufficient number of qualities of it which is the assumption of formal logic. The transition may then be summed as follows the whole nature of everything consists in its qualities, by which it stands in reciprocal determination with everything else. And as everything has some qualities in common with every- thing else, the nature of everything may always be expressed in part by pointing out some common quality, which it shares with something else. This common quality, now that it is