Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/183

 HEGEL'S TREATMENT OF THE CATEGORIES OP THE IDEA. 169 immediate and ultimate, there would be great danger that readers of the dialectic should forget that this immediate and ultimate harmony is what the category means, and that they should take one side as determining the other. Hegel guards against this danger by expressly stating this view, and show- ing that it is inadequate and must be transcended. And there is also a second reason for the introduction of Cognition Proper and Volition. It is true that the primary object of the dialectic is to get to the end of its process, and to reach the Absolute Idea the only really true category. But this is not the only object which it has. Another is to enable us to judge properly of the lower categories when we find them, as we always do find them, prominent in our ordinary experience. The dialectic, while it proves that none of these are absolutely true, has also to prove that they possess relative truth, and has to enable us to judge of their comparative adequacy for the expression of reality. Now the two categories of Cognition Proper and Volition are, as their names imply, the categories which we use when we consider our actual knowledge and will. (Our knowledge and will, indeed, are not perfect examples of these categories, but they can be expressed by no others.) The exact relation, in which our knowledge and will stand to absolute reality, must always be a subject of deep interest both for life and for philosophy. And it was well worth while to make three steps when one might logically have carried us over the ground, for the purpose of showing, so far as it can be done by abstract thought, what that relation is. To give such reasons as these in defence of steps in the dialectic involves, no doubt, that those steps have not the full objective significance which Hegel himself almost cer- tainly assigned to them. The Absolute Idea has most emphatically objective reality. The lower categories are valid steps in the demonstration of the Absolute Idea. And, more than this, they are moments which may be discovered in the Absolute Idea by abstraction. But we cannot ascribe objective reality, even of a timeless nature, to the dialectic process itself, as Hegel exhibits it, if the end of the process could have been reached with equal validity, though with less convenience, by leaving out two stages. But the conclusion that the process itself cannot be properly allowed such reality is one which on many grounds seems to be inevitable. 1 It is a departure from 1 1 have discussed some of these in Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, chap, iv., B.