Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/290

 278 GEORGE J. STOKES : we have urged against Kant is valid also against the dialectical method. The dialectical process is not a process of cognition, nor indeed a possible process at all. There exists in it the same fatal tautology which we have already objected to as existing in Kant. The h priori object of cognition lies in the nature of cognition itself for Kant. Kant apparently avoids the tautology involved in a cognition which is thus act and object of the act in one, by postulating an a posteriori object in or along with the a priori. The Diny-an-si-ch acting upon our receptivity produces a sensuous manifold through which the faculty of knowledge is awakened into cognition and self-cognition, in that it cognises its own h priori nature in and with the objects of sense. The Ding- an-sich thus awakens cognition into exercise and differentiates its purely tautological relation to itself. But this mixing up of the matter of sense with the self-relation of cognition does not really avail Kant. The two ingredients are side by side like oil and water shaken together. And the peculiar weakness in the relation of cognition to itself as a priori element in the object is not in the least affected by the fact that the h posteriori given element is worked up through it. Is this difficulty removed in the dialectical process ? Here the element of differentiation, the manifold, is not given from without, produced by the operation of a thing-in-itself, but is conceived as inherent in the nature of thought itself. But this does not alter the matter one whit, so long as the method of mechanical mixture is retained. And this is what the dialectical method does retain. It shows that one notion is not without the other, that it strikes round into its opposite, &c. ; but in all this an intelligent mediation is altogether wanting. The validity of any notion consists in being the notion of something distinct from itself. To convert this intelligible relation, which lies in the nature of any and every thought, into a series of mechanical transformations with opposite thoughts, is what the dialectic of Hegel accomplishes. In Hegel there are two things confounded, run together into one, which should be strictly held apart, viz., the movement or synthesis in thought and the movement or synthesis in the object of thought. With all his struggles after a more living unity he never freed himself from the prejudice of the Identitdtsphilosopliie that the agreement between these two sides must be one of Identity. But seeing that the element of Difference was just as essentially present as that of Identity, he conceived the identity in question as the identity of a movement capable of giving birth to this as well as all other differences. But a movement which is identical through the differences is just as little capable of giving birth to the differences through which it is, as is the most rigid and motionless identity. Therefore, even if we concede to Hegel that his method gives an adequate representation of the synthetical movement of thought (and it lies in the very nature of thought to involve synthesis), it does not by any means follow