Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/499

 498 S. ALEXANDER : says, the beasts would be the better physicists, for they devour nature and turn it to their own purposes (p. 16). But though science thinks nature it is imperfect (p. 19), for in the first place its universals are left abstract or formal : they are taken from facts as we find them, abstracted from them, and therefore seem to exist apart from the actual thing. The conception of specific heat, for instance, is derived from observing certain sets of facts, which are gene- ralised under a common name ; it is not shown w r hy there should exist particular facts of this quality. That the angles of incidence and reflexion are equal is a general law, common to all instances of light impinging on a mirror ; but this law gives only a common quality without assigning its secret. And with this is intimately connected a second defect, at bottom identical with the former. The content of the natural facts is in the scientific law dissected, and falls into separate parts. Just as a flower is said to consist of various parts, or a body is regarded as a combination of many quali- ties, strung together by help of the connecting particle ' and ' (compare Phdnomenologie, pp. 84 ff.) : so in the law that bodies fall through spaces which vary as the square of the time, body and fall and space and time are unconnected. The content is thus not a complete and concrete whole whose behaviour is the necessity of its nature : for philo- sophy the law of fall must be shown to follow from the very conception or constitution of matter ; it will then be exhi- bited as a law of distance and time. It is these imperfections of physics that render a philo- sophy of nature possible and necessary, the office of which is to exhibit the whole world of nature as a system of ideas, each of its ideas being contained hi the supreme and con- crete idea of nature. n. Wlmt f /ifii is Nature ? The question can be answered properly only in the complete elaboration of the Philo- sophy of Nature. But in the abstract there are two ways in which Hegel answers the question ; the one answer places nature in connexion with the logical Idea, the other in connexion with the idea of Spirit. According to the former, Nature is the self-liberation or the self-alienation, or the otherness, of the Idea ; according to the latter, Nature is that which is transcended so as to become Spirit. (1) The Idea or Notion, Nature and Spirit are the names of the triad which makes up the whole of reality : the last