Page:Philosophical Review Volume 9.djvu/555

539, for the individuals do not need to exist for the unity, because the unity is not different from all the individuals together, and there being nothing outside the unity, it would have nothing to cognize. Lotze, however, says it cognizes itself. Hegel errs in taking the category of Life to imply a plurality of living beings, for here we have only an aggregate, and not an organic unity. A real harmony and unity of the individuals appears when we reach Cognition. In Cognition proper the aim of the subject is to reproduce in itself the state of the world at large. Volition means a sense of approval of objective reality as in harmony with our desires. So in the Larger Logic this category is called the Idea of the Good. This asserts, then, that the unity reproduces the nature of the individual. But Volition cannot completely reconcile the individuals and the unity. Hence another category, the Transition to the Absolute Idea, which Hegel does not specially mention. To insert this is necessary for clearness, though being at the end of the dialectic, it is identical with the next category the Absolute Idea, and as such requires no separate treatment. The Absolute Idea alone has complete objective reality, and this reality is a differentiated unity. There are no contradictions here, and so no need of any further category. There is, however, an imperfection, and this drives Hegel on from pure thought to a Philosophy of Nature, and finally to a Philosophy of Spirit. In the Absolute Idea we find the individuals and the differentiations as constituting reality, or rather as constituting the immediate centers of differentiation, and the relations which unite and mediate them. Reality has been taken to be one or other of these. Green took it to be the latter. But to the dialectic reality consists of immediate centers which are mediated by relations. This must be one of the forms of consciousness, and is rather emotion than knowledge or volition. In emotion only do we find that absolute balance between the individuality and the unity, and the individual separateness which is necessary for reality. What Hegel's own view was seems rather doubtful. The Logic would seem to point to emotion, and the Philosophy of Spirit to knowledge. The two elements, however remain, the unity, or that which gives to experience a must, and the special natures of the individuals which it unites, and which give to experience its is.

We are concerned here with a study of the concept of natural law, and with the nature of scientific explanation in general. Like all other things in nature, the concepts of natural causality and natural law are products of evolution. Pythagoras was the first to appreciate the place which the laws of form play in any philosophical explanation of the world. But the Greeks lacked one thing which was essential to the rapid development of physical principles, and that was what moderns call mathematical