Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/502

 HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OP NATUEE. 501 connexion between two different things which yet form a unity is expressed by the scientific conception of polarity. Nature reveals the difference inherent in its conception as an actual separation of two things : it is the other as other ; and Hegel, with a quaint reminiscence of Plato, sees in this, the secret of the recurrence in nature of the number four, in four elements, four colours, or even five one for the notion, two for its difference, one for its return out of difference (p. 31). The accidentally or indifference of nature is thus of its essence, and is exhibited to us in the wild confusion of its forms. Though transparent to Spirit, it is like a magic beryl, full of wild, fantastic shapes : it is a " Bacchantic god " (p. 24) : it cannot preserve the outlines and limits of ideas and types, but in its profusion of forms, and in the monstrosities of organic life (p. 651), it varies from them indefinitely. This tttiity which we so much admire in nature Hegel regards not as its glory, but as its weakness (Olmmacht), its inade- quacy. Hegel never could be induced to admire mere variety or multiplicity : with the true instinct of the philosopher he sought relief from the broken lights of the Idea in the self- sufficiency of the Idea itself ; the starry heavens bored him. To him, though its otherness was Nature's law, it was its primal vice or defect, out of which arose its effort to become what it implicitly is, Spirit. (2) We have traced the connexion of Nature with the logical Idea : we have to show its relation to Spirit. Spirit (Geist) is the truth of Nature, which therefore presents itself as a series of stages which lead up to the notion of Spirit. 1 It begins with Space and Time, the bare notion of self-externality, and it ends with organic life, in which nature, though not yet spirit, yet shows that self-concentra- tion, or inward reflection (recognised in its simplest form in the process of assimilation and conservation), which is the prelude to the life of spirit. As the spirit in the forms of Religion is the Holy Ghost as it exists in the minds of the community, the natural man informed with the Idea, which is God, through the medium of the Son, so the Spirit or Thought is the Idea completely realised, a return from its own externality as Nature into itself as Spirit. " The end of nature is to destroy itself, to break through its immediate sensible covering, and like the phoenix from its flames to arise from this externality new-born as spirit" (p. 695). " This liberation from nature and her necessity is the notion of the philosophy of nature." But once more it is necessary 1 Einleitung, pp. 32-39.