Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/625

No. 6.] absolute separation. That is to say, at the moment in which a given cycle of history has so far succeeded that it can express its principle free from the mass of incident with which it had been bound up (and so hidden from consciousness) at that moment this principle appears in purely negative form. It is the negation of the preceding movement because in it that movement has succeeded — has summed itself up. Success always negates the process which leads up to it, because it renders that process unnecessary; it takes away from it all function and thus all excuse for being. Just so, for example, Hellenic life transcended itself in Socrates; in him it became conscious of the principle (the universality of the self, to express it roughly) which had been striving to realize itself. The movement having come to consciousness, having generalized itself, its principle at once assumed a negative relation to the forms in which this principle had been only partially embodied. Just because Socrates was, in his consciousness, a complete Greek, he wrote the epitaph of Greece. So, to take another obvious example, Jesus, in fulfilling the law, transcended it, so that those who were "in Christ Jesus, were no longer under the law." Now just because the principle in its completion, its generalization is negative to its own partial realizations or embodiments, just because it negates its own immediate historic antecedents, it is easy to conceive of it as negative to all embodiment. At a certain stage of the movement, this transformation of a historic into an absolute negative is not only easy, but, as it would seem, inevitable. This stage is the moment when the principle which sums up one movement is seen to be the law for the next movement and has not as yet got organized into further outward or institutional forms. For the moment (the moment may last a century) the principle having transcended one institutional expression, and not having succeeded in getting another, seems to be wholly in the air — essentially negative to all possible realization. The very completeness with which the principle sums up and states the reality of life seems, by the one great paradox, to put it in opposition to that reality — to make of it something essentially transcending experience. The great example of this is the