Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/507

 506 S. ALEXANDER : lastly, of the forms of the Absolute Spirit (Art Religion, and Philosophy), in which his complete notion is attained. If each of the three Idea and Nature and Spirit shines in reality through the other two, it is plain that a correspond- ence of this kind is to be expected. It points to the truth that Idea and Nature are each of them abstractly what Spirit is concretely or realised, and that Spirit is its own recovery from Nature. It is a truth which in reading Hegel we are apt to lose sight of, being misled by the delusive appearance of a regular progress from Logic to Nature and thence to Spirit. In reality they are parallel developments, not, however, separate, but mutually involved. rv. I will exemplify Hegel's method in detail from each of the three great divisions of Natural Philosophy. These examples will illustrate both the ideal character of facts which in our ordinary experience we learn mainly through our senses and without reflection, and the process of dia- lectic by which one ideal character is absorbed and held in solution in a higher and more definite one. (1) Space and Time. Space is the first or simplest and most abstract form in which the Idea appears as Nature. It is not, as in Kant's view, something subjective, a form of the mind, for Hegel's philosophy does not deal with the elements of knowledge as they are contained in the mind or the consciousness, but with knowledge as such, which in our consciousness we only recover. We think of matter as something solid and substantial, different altogether from space and time, and we ascribe to it a reality which we deny to them. This is a mistake : space and time are in the world as much as matter, which is, as it were, a condensa- tion of them, much in the same way as in the old Ionic philosophies the whole world was derived from the abstract idea of an element by condensation and rarefaction, that is, by positive and negative movement. Space (pp. 44-5), then, is Nature, but Nature as totally indifferent it is juxtaposi- tion pure and simple without a break : it is the natural form of the logical idea of quantity, the essence of which is its continuousness and its indifference ; no matter where you stop in measuring a thing you still have mere quantity, and you leave the quality unaffected. However, space is not motionless it would not in that case be transparent to the idea it has within it the beginning of life or negation ; but its life is a weary round which never gets beyond itself: every