Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/189

], succeeds in showing that the world of experience must necessarily be related to unity of intelligence. To Kant, this unity of intelligence is, no doubt, the subjective ego. But, I think, a Kantian need not be confined within the narrow limits prescribed by his master. Kant himself shows how the regulative conception of a Divine Being is necessary to make our experience a rounded whole. His disciple is entitled to go a little beyond him in order to make his doctrine of the necessary relation of Nature to intelligence complete. Nature, as we know it, cannot exist unless it is related to mind, but this mind cannot be our finite mind, because the finite mind itself has a gradual growth in time and as such requires explanation. If Nature is not the creation of any finite mind, and if it cannot be conceived as unrelated to intelligence, it must be regarded as the object of divine thought. But when all this is said, the essential problem of Philosophy remains untouched. Kant's Epistemology only prepares the way to Metaphysics and cannot be a substitute for it.

A careful investigation shows that the ground-principles of Nature are the categories of thought. Philosophy has to inquire how these categories are related to each other. How does the distinction of subject and object arise within thought, and how is it transcended? The categories of thought are universals, but the phenomena of Nature are particulars—how can the former explain the latter? Hegel alone has boldly faced these and other problems and attempted to solve them. He shows that if we begin with the most abstract category, devoid of all content, viz., Pure Being, we are led on and on by an immanent dialectic till we reach the notion of the Absolute Idea, which contains the antithesis of thought and being—subject and object within itself in solution. Now, according to Hegel, the phenomena of Nature are nothing but the sum-total of the particularizations of the categories. This particularization does not, of course, take place in time. No arbitrary distinction between the universal and the particular is allowable from Hegel's point of view. It is only the requirement of Science that has led Hegel to treat of the categories in the abstract,