Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/174

 160 J. ELLIS MCTAGGAET: never be completely true. And thus its contradiction can never take the form of its cessation in time. Hegel's treatment of Life reminds us of his treatment of Chemism. In Chemism also he endeavoured to demonstrate the inadequacy of the category by showing that it could not permanently hold of anything, instead of showing, as the dialectic requires, that it could never hold of anything. In both cases he was, it seems probable, misled by the name that he had taken for the category into introducing an em- pirical element which should have had no place in the Logic. And it is to be remarked that in each case he did not help, but hinder, his argument by doing so. It is asserted by some of his critics that he would never have been able to make any of the transitions of the dialectic without the illegitimate intro- duction of empirical elements. It would be more correct to make exactly the opposite statement. When he does, as in these two categories, mix up the Logic with empirical elements, he fails to demonstrate the transitions, while in each case a valid transition could have been made, if he had only kept, as he proposed to keep, to pure thought. It will be unnecessary to consider the subdivisions into which Hegel has divided the category of Life- namely, the Living Individual, the Life Process, and the Species. For the whole meaning of the divisions, and of Hegel's transi- tions from one to the other, depends on the assumption that there are a plurality of organic unities, and, therefore, if I have been correct in my view on this matter, is invalid. We can proceed at once to the consideration in detail of COGNITION. The Individual and the Unity may now be said to har- monise with one another. It may be noticed that this is the first time in the course of the dialectic that we have reached a real harmony, i.e., a similarity between the natures of the different things. Something which could be mistaken for a harmony appeared in Reciprocity it is this that Hegel calls the transition from Necessity to Free- dom. It appeared again in Absolute Mechanism, and once more in Teleology. But it was not a real harmony between the part and the whole which we found in any of these. It was a denial of any nature of its own to the part, the reduction of the part to a mere Mode, as Spinoza would have said, of the whole. In such a case there can be no' want of harmony, any more than there can be any con- straint in slavery which is carried so far that the slave has