Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/291

 GOING BACK TO KANT. 279 that the movement itself is thereby accounted for. On the con- trary, by trying to represent this movement as self-movement he falls" back into the analytic groove out of which Kant professed to bring Philosophy. That Kant himself did not succeed in what he aimed at, it was comparatively easy to show. He assumed beforehand his categories and their syntheses as existing ready to hand in the constitution of the understanding and waiting only for sensation to awaken them into activity, as plainly and openly as did ever the dogmatic philosophers the nature and properties of things-in-themselves, when once sensation had made us aware of their existence. The only difference is that the synthesis which the dogmatists assumed as existing without, Kant assumed as existing within ; and the influence exerted on experience is regarded in the one case as coming from an external, in the other from an internal source. Synthesis, as synthetical movement of thought, can here be scarcely said to exist. But in Hegel it does exist, and correctly enough too, as thinking that through which itself is. The question is Is that through which the movement of thought is, something distinct from this movement and given independently of it, or is it merely the result of the movement itself ? According to Hegel the forward movement of thought in philo- sophy is quite as much a going backwards, a return into the ground from which that wherewith the beginning was made depends, and by which it is in fact produced. This statement of Hegel arises from his confusion of the order of knowledge with the order of reality and his failure to perceive that the former is only through the latter as distinct from itself. But making al- lowance for this we may admit a certain correctness in the Hegelian method. The principle of the method points out not what that which we think about or seek to discover must be like, but what our thinking about it must be like in order to be science. It points out the relation in which our completed knowledge must stand to the knowledge with which we began. But this relation does not exist simply through itself. It exists only through a rela- tion of objectivity which it implicates as the condition of its own possibility as knowledge. It is because the movement of thought thus for its own existence requires that to be through which it itself is and in the cognition of which it consists, that it has been represented as the condition and source of the objective being which it cognises, and in ontology or metaphysics as the creator of the very things w r hich it is said to be the instrument afterwards of investigating. But the movement of thought is not in itself the source of its own movement. Thought has its being as much out of as within itself, and to suppose that it is otherwise is the great defect of the dialectical method. To Hegel the movement of the " Begriff " is the movement " der Sache selbst ". But that is just what it is not, though it is a movement which is only through a correlative objective relativity. The movement of