Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/458

 446 G. J. STOKES'S OBJECTIVITY OF TRUTH. as " a bastard objectivity ". It merely points, he says, to "thought here and thought there". But when he comes to explain his own meaning, we find him saying of the object of thought : " In thinking this object, thought does not think simply itself. In so far as it thinks itself, it thinks itself materialised, and so far, other than itself", (p. 50). Now " other- ness " and " materiature " or " petrifaction " are the very phrases which Hegel (followed by Dr. Stirling) employs to body forth his own position. I cannot see that in either case the expressions used throw much light on the fact. But one way in which an argument like Mr. Stokes's may be useful is by making the " Hegelians " among us ask themselves how far they are prepared to let nature go free, in Hegel's own phrase, from the notion or from subjective thought. What is the precise meaning which they attach to the externality of thought to itself in nature to the relative independence which they admit to belong to the object? In some expositors, the idealistic tone predominates, and we seem not far removed from Subjective Idealism ; in others the realistic prevails, and nature, as we may say, gets so much line that we seem almost to join hands with Natural Eealism. Dr. Stirling, it may be noted, has always inclined to the latter mode of presentation, and perhaps increasingly so in his later works. From a more general point of view, Mr. Stokes's Essay is valuable as a protest against the neglect of " reality " by the Idealistic systems that take their rise in a theory of knowledge. There ought to be no quarrel with the motto he has chosen, "Abstract notions can do nothing," nor with his addition thereto, " They cannot even of themselves be ". Nature is not simply the categories doubled. It is only because the universe exists as a concrete reality that thought exists in its relative opposition to being. This concrete reality is what Hegel calls Spirit ; Spirit is throughout assumed by Hegel as a fact, and his system is the analysis of its nature. And, of course, Hegel always assumes, too, that concrete Spirit is a great deal more than abstract notions or even than abstract notions reflected back upon them- selves. I must confess that I have never been able to see where or how Hegel deduces this something more (feeling, for example, with all its implicates) ; but neither do I find Mr. Stokes com- pletely successful in that respect. From the nature of the case, Being can only be described in terms of thought ; our systems are descriptions of existence by the systematising intellect. But it is misleading to assert (or to seem to assert) that the notions we use in the description are existence. If some Hegelian thought seems to involve this claim, Mr. Stokes does good service in calling attention to the fallacy. His polemic on this point does not prevent him from laying down in his concluding chapters ("The Objectivity of Truth in Science " and "The Objectivity of Truth in Keligion ") a position substantially the same as Hegel's,