Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/169

 HEGEL'S TREATMENT OF THE CATEGORIES OF THE IDEA. 155 And there is another objection, arising from a question which is logically previous to this. Is the abstract idea, which is named after the concrete state, really an essential element of that state at all? This is a question which cannot be settled by the dialectic process, which only deals with such abstract ideas as can be reached by pure thought, and cannot discuss the question whether a particular pure thought can be found by analysis in a particular empirical fact. By giving such a name to the category, the dialectic assumes that the answer to the question is in the affirma- tive, but does not prove it. Should it be mistaken in this assumption, the only injury done to the dialectic itself will be that the category has an inappropriate name, which may be misleading. But if, in the applications of the dialectic, we assume that such a category is always true of the part of experience after which it is named, we may be led hopelessly wrong. In the case before us it is clear, as I have endeavoured to show above, that, according to Hegel's category of Cognition, nothing can cognise unless it has something outside itself to be cognised, and that consequently it is impossible that the unity, which has nothing outside itself, should cognise any- thing. But it by no means follows from this that we cannot attribute cognition or consciousness to that unity. For such a step would imply that Hegel's category of Cognition was the essential characteristic of what is ordinarily called thought, and, whether this is true or false, it is certainly not proved. All the thought indeed of which we are immediately conscious is of this sort, for we know no thought but our own directly, and we are finite beings, but supposing that Lotze was right in asserting that an all-embracing unity could be conscious of itself, then we should have to admit that it was not an essential characteristic of thought to be for the thinker in the way in which the unity is for the individual in Hegel's category. Of course this would not involve any inaccuracy in the dialectic. The dialectic as- serts that the individuals are not for the unity in a specified sense. There is nothing incompatible with this in the as- sertion that the unity is nevertheless conscious. (I may remark in passing that the attempt to regard the unity as in any sense conscious or personal seems to me to be ab- solutely unjustifiable. But the arguments on this question belong to the Philosophy of Spirit, and not to the Logic.) The unity then is for the individuals, but the individuals are not for the unity. The correctness of this conclusion may be challenged on the ground of its atomism. If each of the