Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/73

 HEGEL'S TREATMENT OF THE OBJECTIVE NOTION. 59 only, while the second is to be found in the Smaller Logic also. They may be said to be based on the same general principle, but are perfectly distinct points and must be treated separately. In the first (Werke, vol. v., p. 229) he says that if we accepted the position of this category we should be forced to insert, between the End and the Means, a second Means, and then, between the End and this second Means, a third Means, and so on ad infinitum, and that this involves a con- tradiction. Let us expand this argument rather more than Hegel does himself, and examine its validity. If the End and the Means are to be taken as distinguish- able entities, then it is clear that each of them must correspond to all the conditions which are necessary to the existence of any entity. Now we have seen, over and over again, in the course of the dialectic, that no entity of any sort can be a blank or undifferentiated unity. Therefore, the End cannot be such a unity. It must be differentiated. This, indeed, has already been admitted, and the work of the Means is to differentiate it. But and here the root of the contradiction appears if the End has an existence distinguishable from the Means, it must have a differentiation distinguishable from the Means. Now the End is fundamentally a unity, and we have seen in the breakdown of Chemism that a unity cannot produce its own differentiation, but must have an element of differentiation which is correlative to, and not derived from, the unity. Within the End, therefore, and apart from the Means, there must be an element of differentiation. But the defini- tion of a Means, as we have seen, is just the plurality which differentiates a unity in this way, and this element of differ- entiation will be a second Means, between the End and the first Means. And now that it is a Means, it will, by the category which we are considering, be distinguishable from the End. By the same reasoning as before, the End will require some differentiation independent of the Means, and this differentiation will become a third Means, between the End and the second Means. And this process will go on ad infinitum. Such an infinite process as this is clearly a sign of error. By the hypothesis the End and the original Means are united. But for this union an infinite series of intermediate Means are required. The End and the original Means can only be united when this infinite series is completed that is to say, they never can be united. And so the category is contradictory.