Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/501

 500 S. ALEXANDER : of the Idea : not beyond the Idea, but the Idea itself as really being. 1 This transition is very obscure, and perhaps impossible ; but if we may in an account of Hegel permit ourselves the language of mere conception ( Vorstellung), we may think of the Idea as the complete law of the universe. In this com- pleteness, needing no aid from other laws, it is itself some- thing ; it is, as it were, condensed into points which we recognise as nature. For things are actually made by the laws which are the relations between them. Hence a per- fect law is a perfect system of nature which is its bearer or expression. Nature is in this way the otherness or the self-liberation of the Idea, and yet permeated or interpenetrated with it, so .as to be transparent to it. In his earlier school-lectures 2 Hegel described it as the copy of the Idea, but neither this nor the description I have given is to be understood as equi- valent to the common saying that nature is the mirror of God. Hegel might say that such metaphors were true, but insufficient for the abstract nature of thought : they did not explain the real connexion of thought with nature. Still less would he admit that in being transparent to thought nature was in fact a system of spiritual atoms ; his coarse common sense would have rejected the vague mystery of such a conception. But this does not exhaust the logical character of Nature. We have recognised it only as the Idea in the form of imrne- diateness, of existence then and there, in virtue of its being the self-liberation or otherness of the Idea. But being the otherness of the Idea, of that which is always one and single and self-contained, it is the other as such, or it contains in itself the principle of otherness. 3 It therefore falls apart into a multitude of isolated parts or characters, all external to each other ; and in its first or immediate form it is Space, the very abstract idea of self-externality, in which every part is indifferent to every other. Hence the accidentally and the blind necessity which constitute nature : it is accidental because of the indifference of its parts ; it is subject to neces- sity because in their indifference they are yet constrained within the unity of nature as a whole (p. 30). This necessary 1 In expounding tin- first element in the notion of Nature us the inime- diateness of tin; Idea, its otherness as merely l>ein;4, I- am following the transition at the end of the larger Logic. JVerke, v., pp. 352-3. 2 Rosenkran/'s Preface to Propadeutik (JFerke, xviii.), p. xvii. 3 Einleitimg, pp. 23 ff.