Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/514

 HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OF NATURE. 513 Hegel and Newton. The noise of Hegel's attack upon Newton, once very audible, has been almost smiled away ; yet the opposition rests exactly on the same grounds. Hegel is on the side of totality, Newton on the side of distinction and analysis. The world has taken the side of Newton and declared for analysis. Let us begin with the theory of Colour (pp. 298 ff.). Colour appeared to Hegel (following what he called Goethe's great sense of nature) to be, in its real place in the world, the union of two things, the abstract identity of light, and the principle of darkness which is embodied in solid or coherent matter. There is therefore a real light and a real dark, which generate colour by their blending. Colour then is a later stage of nature than light, for it is possible only when matter is specified out of its abstract self, which is light, into its difference, so as to have specific gravity and cohesion. Colour then is the obscuration of light by the dark, and it is seen in experience only when there is an interruption of transparency. The prismatic colours are upon this theory caused by bringing light over the dark prism, which limits or interrupts the light, partly by its edges, partly by its vary- ing thickness. Here again Hegel will have facts as they are, .as a whole. Colour is not an element in light as it is on Newton's theory ; colour is, as everyone knows, darker than light. How should light be composed of many darknesses ? But wherever there is a difference of light and dark, there is the specification of light as colour, as round the edges of a candle-flame in the day-light. Newton, on the other hand, finding that light has broken through the prism into a spectrum of colours, declares these colours to be the compo- nents of light. In thus analysing light, he seemed to Hegel to be inverting the real order. He did not take into account the whole phenomenon. He neglected the existence of the prism itself, which, by its presence, conditioned the colour. The prism itself was the dark which imparted difference to this abstract light and coloured it. But it was in the field of Mechanics that the chief assault took place. Hegel's complaint against the mathematicians was that they converted distinctions made for the purposes of analysis into existing facts. With this weapon he attacks first the proof of the law of fall, and then, with all the vio- lence which he employed against those who differed from him, the Newtonian theory of the movements of the hea- venly bodies. The law of falling bodies, to take the simpler case first, is that the distance traversed varies as the square of the time, s = gt z where g is the acceleration, y the dis-