Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/516

 HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OF NATUEE. 515 The laws of Kepler must therefore follow from the conception of the heavenly system as a whole. It would be too long to follow Hegel's proof of all three laws. The proof of the third law, that the squares of the times are propor- tional to the cubes of the mean distances, is at once the most difficult and most interesting by its contrast with the proof of the law of falling bodies. In the relatively free motion of fall, time and space were related as square and radix ; but the heavenly motions are completely free, the image of the notion in the mechanical world. Each element is therefore itself a totality, and there is no accidentality in either. But time in the first power is a mere abstract number, so many minutes or seconds or years : to have quality it must be self-related, must be taken in the second power. Space on the other hand in this case the linear radius vector of the planet, which is a measure of the arc traversed must attain the dimensions which are adequate to the notion and be taken as a whole or in the third dimension, and therefore as the cube of the linear distance. What a waste of ingenuity it seems, and with what naive effrontery Hegel attacks ways of thinking the most familiar to the human understanding ! How, we are inclined to say, would Hegel have discovered the necessary determinations of space and time except he already knew what they were to be ? The answer would be : It would certainly be im- possible ; but it was by actual experience that the philo- sophic notion of space and the planetary system was suggested. Kepler discovered the laws of the planetary motions and Newton subjected them to mathematical treat- ment. These distinctions have their value in mathematical analysis. It is for philosophy, Hegel might say, to accept these results, only to see them in a new way whence Plato called philosophy a turning round to the light. It has to clear up the categories used in the sciences and to found its treatment upon the notion of the thing as it really is. And strange as Hegel's method of proof may seem, we cannot help seeing the value of his totality of view : he will not dissect nature, but will in each conception take it as a whole. How this may illumine familiar facts we can conclude from his treatment of the First Law of Motion. The motion con- templated by that law is not the motion of fall, but ordinary impressed motion, and it asserts that a body will persist in motion or rest till altered by some external cause. This is nothing but motion and rest regarded in their identity ; if a body moves it moves, and if it rests it rests (p. 78). What if after all the sciences should turn out to be only provisional,