Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/180

 166 J. ELLIS MCTAGGABT : of the harmony is absolutely necessary, the category breaks down in another way. It is as correct and no more to say that the unity reproduces the nature of the individuals, than it is to say the individuals reproduce the nature of the unity. But the truth requires us not to say both, but, on the con- trary, to say neither. For if the possibility of disharmony is absolutely unmeaning, then the distinction between reproducing and reproduced becomes unmeaning too. When the difficulty is put this way, the answer seems simple enough. Why trouble about which side reproduces which at all ? That is a question which belongs only to the sphere of harmonies actually or possibly imperfect. Here, when the whole existence of the unity on one side and of the individuals on the other has been demonstrated to lie in their harmony, it is superfluous. Neither side needs to be in dependence on the other in order to secure harmony, when the harmony is the whole'nature of each. We remove the difficulty by removing all terms which assert such a dependence. Let us say that the nature of the unity and the individuals is to have the same content a content, it is to be remembered, possessed in different ways, in the unity, and for the individuals. This gives a harmony when the two sides the unity and the individual, or, from another stand-point, the subject and objective reality are absolutely equal. Neither is the pattern for the other. No pattern is needed, since there is no possibility of discrepancy. The harmony is the whole reality. This gives us a third stage of Cognition in the wider sense, which, after some analogies elsewhere in the dialectic, we may call THE TRANSITION TO THE ABSOLUTE IDEA. We have to find a name for this category, for it is not specially mentioned by Hegel at all. There is nothing very surprising in this, when we consider the matter attentively. As the synthesis of the triad of Cognition it would in the natural course of things be identical in substantial meaning with the thesis of the new triad. The Absolute Idea, how- ever, which is the category succeeding Cognition, is not sub- divided by Hegel at all, and it is therefore with the Absolute Idea as a whole that the synthesis of the Cognition triad will be identical. The only difference between them will be in the " collapse into immediacy " which constitutes the tran- sition between them. The collapse into immediacy, however, makes less and less difference between the two categories as we get farther on in