Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/503

 502 S. ALEXANDEB : to follow Hegel in emphasising that these stages are not stages of actual natural development, which occurred in fact and were open to the observation of whatever minds may have lived in the past. They are stages in logical develop- ment, they grow out of each other by logical necessity : " the forms of Nature are forms of the Notion, though in the element of externality ". Each stage is not the historical outcome of the preceding, as we might say that the existing horse with one toe is the outcome of the Pliocene horse with five, but its truth, which was contained in it and is evolved from it by the inner necessity of the notion of nature. The theory of evolution is a theory of the history of nature, and whether it be true or false it is a series of events in time ; but the Hegelian development is an eternal process, which is present in its totality at any one moment of nature's existence. It is nature in the form of thought, and a process as thought is. Thus spirit is not a natural product which grows out of nature, but is a conception present throughout nature, higher than nature, and therefore the ground of the possibility of nature. This development of conceptions may be described as a progressively definite assertion of what is contained in the notion of nature : in each new stage characters which were latent in the preceding come to overt existence (p. 38). The process has therefore a double appearance. On the one hand the more the different parts into which in nature the Idea falls receive a definite character, the more completely is the Idea externalised and explicated, the more does it go out of itself. At first it is like a mist, self-external, but homogeneous, the protoplasm of externality ; by and by it forms into definite characters, and ultimately it is organic. But on the other hand the Notion is always present in its external forms, and holds them together into unity ; they may resist our understandings, but they cannot ultimately resist the Spirit : and therefore from this side the process is one of ever greater inwardness ; " the evolution is also involu- tion," until in life the notion is clear and evident. in. Divisions of Nature. The different stages of conception which nature exhibits form the bulk of Hegel's PJiilu- sopky of Nature. It would be impossible to describe them all, even if I could be sure that I entered fully into the meaning of all of Hegel's distinctions. I shall therefore describe only the main divisions of the subject, and shall