Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/183

 172 J. DEWEY : nature of the whole. Thus is revealed the contradiction between form and content involved in the use of logic as the method of philosophy. Spirit is reached by a locju-nl process, and the logical result is that as fact it is not reached at all. As concrete, it is beyond the reach of any abstract process. Either one must call in the aid of the presupposed but suppressed Fact, and recognise that after all the process has been going on within a further and higher determina- tion ; or, failing to see this, must recognise Spirit as only one factor or moment of the logical movement, that is, give up the notion of self-consciousness as subject, and fall back into Spinozistic pantheism. The logical movement, con- sidered by itself, is always balancing in unstable equilibrium between dualism and pantheism. Set up as absolute method, it either recognises the fact, but being unable to comprehend it, has to regard this fact, as foreign element over against it, as the matter of Plato and Aristotle, the thing-in-itself of Kant, and Anstoss of Fichte, 1 or endeavours to absorb the Fact as a mere element in its own logical being, and falls into Pantheism. This is the reason why Hegel, although the very centre of his system is self-conditioned spirit, lends himself so easily to pantheistic treatment. Logic cannot reach, however much it may point to, an actual individual. The gathering up of the universe into the one self-conscious individuality it may assert as necessary, it cannot give it as reality. It is only as logic contradicts itself and faces back on the con- stant presupposition of this reality that it can demonstrate what it asserts. Taken purely by itself it must issue in a pantheism where the only real is the Idee, and where all its factors and moments, including spirit and nature, are real only at different stages or phases of the Idee, but vanish as imperfect ways of looking at things, or as illusions, when we reach the Idee. And thus the Idee itself vanishes, as uu organic system, as a unity which lives through its distinc- tions, and becomes a dead identity, in no way distinguishable from the substance of Spinoza. Logic set up as absolute method reveals its self-contradiction by destroying itself. In a purely logical method the distinctions, the process must disappear in the final unity, the product. Only a living actual Fact can preserve within its unity that organic system of differences in virtue of which it lives and moves and has 1 The inability to <jo from the ' because ' of reason ti the ' cause ' of fad, from lo;_, r ir to reality, when logic is not taken simply as one movement within reality, is clearly set forth in the closing chapters of Mr. Bradley'* J'rinciples of Logic.