Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/500

 HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OF NATUEE. 499 is the complete expression of the former two in their com- bination, and it is implicit in each of them. In each of the triad the other two are in fact implied in different ways, and when the Idea is spoken of for itself it is always through reference to Spirit that it has a meaning, and that in fact its process can be discovered. The logical Idea is the whole world of natural and intelligible things in its abstract form, but it is no mere reposeful conception ; it is a process, the process of dialectic. It is not merely a process for us r with our habits of learning, but in itself a process, and therefore, like the Platonic dialectic after which it is named, identical with its method. Hence in its beginning its end is con- tained : the bare category of Being is full of the negativity which is the secret of the Notion, the final result. The office of Logic is to show how simpler and abstracter forms of the Idea are absorbed into the end or total Idea. This Idea is not mere immediateness, such as is imaged by existing things (Seyn), nor relation, such as is repeated in nature in the causal connexion of things ( Wesen], but it is self-deter- mination, such as again is imaged in the will (Begriff}. As thus complete within itself, turning round upon its own axis, and maintaining its cohesion through its very tendency to fly apart, " returning out of its negativity into itself," it is once more immediate, exists then and there, but it is enriched by all the distractions, all the divisions within itself, all the struggles to rise above itself through which it has passed. This metaphorical language, however, does riot mean that the Idea undergoes a process in time : it is a timeless process by which one idea is contained in a higher, which therefore develops out of it : it exists as a whole. The logical Idea, then, is absolute knowledge, or that which is self-centred. What corresponds to it in religious language is the conception of God the Father. But it is still abstract, purely thought ; though defined as the union of thought and reality, and therefore concrete in character, it is out of its own imperfection as thought that it has returned into repose. So far it is subjective and needs realisation in another sphere. God the Father must appear as God the Son. The Idea having traversed all its stages has returned to its beginning, to Being, and as such it is that which is, it is Nature. This is no new determination beyond the Idea, which needs not to pass beyond the circle in which it turns, but is the whole Idea as real. It is the Idea as other which is contained in the Idea, and therefore described by Hegel as the self-liberation, or self-alien atioii and self-resolving