Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/72

 58 j. ELLIS MCTAGGART: possess, apart from the End, was the plurality by which they were enabled to break up the unity of the End. But, if they are taken apart from the End, even their plurality vanishes. For the End is their only unity, and plurality without some unity is impossible. You can only take things together if they have a unity, and if you do not take them together, they are not a plurality. If we consider each of the Means without the End it is absolutely isolated, and in absolute isolation it can have no plurality. It is a mere blank unity i.e., nothing. To suppose, then, that the Means have no intrinsic adapta- tion to the End, is to destroy the possibility of their having an intrinsic nature at all. If, therefore, they are still to retain any externality whatever to the End, that externality must be harmonious to the End. The private nature of each Means must simply consist of its fitness to carry out the End for we have seen that there is nothing else for it to be. With this change, it ceases to be indifferent which Means are employed in carrying out a particular part of the End. Only those Means can do so which are fitted for the task by their own nature. We thus approach more closely in one respect to the ordinary significance of the word Means, which includes some special capability in the Object to carry out the End. It is for this reason that Hegel calls the next division of Teleology MEANS. Of course, here as elsewhere, we must remember the special meaning which End has for Hegel. Though the Means have a certain externality to, and distinction from, the End, yet it is not supposed that they could exist apart from it. The position throughout Teleology is that the Means could not exist if they did not embody the End, nor the End if it were not embodied by the Means. Accordingly, to speak here of the Means as fitted to embody the End may be misleading. It is not a mere potentiality, as when, in the non-Hegelian meaning of the terms, we say that a knife is. the means of committing murder. They would not be Means unless they did embody the End, and when we speak of them as being fitted for it, we only mean that their in- trinsic nature co-operates in the process, and is not to be considered,- as it was in the last subdivision, as indifferent to the End. How, we must now inquire, does this category manifest its inadequacy? Hegel gives two demonstrations of this,, the first of which is to be found in the Greater Logic.