Chapter IX

The fundamental characteristic of the Method of the Logic is its necessary and essential identity with the content just described.

This Hegel continually emphasises; and, indeed, it is in virtue of this that the method can be, as Hegel claims, the only true philosophical method. For if the construction of a system is really not furnished by some means outside the system – an external agency due in the long run to the fact that our mind acts and works in some way apart from the process of the reality we know and seek to systematise – then clearly the system is determined by its own content and from within, i.e., is, in a legitimate sense of the term, “self-constructed." But a self-constructed system of ultimate truth is not simply a philosophy, it is philosophy in its final shape, it is philosophy in the form which has attained the goal of all philosophy. On the method, therefore, depends the possibility of absolute Idealism as a system, just as on the character of the content depended Absolute Knowledge as a reality of experience.

With the validity of the method Hegel’s system as a system stands or falls. We need not be surprised, therefore, at the stress he lays upon an accurate method, or the confidence with which he regards his own.

He does not hesitate to declare that though he might wish the method more completely worked out in detail, he is sure at the same time that it is the only true method to be followed.

It is not difficult to see what is meant by this identity of content with method. In the Phenomenology it was established that mind was the determining principle in experience as a whole, and in each part of it.

Experience, as it appears, is the unfolding of the actual life of Spirit in all its manifold forms. Now not merely in each form, and not merely, again, in the whole was mind present, but itself determined the process from stage to stage, itself made the transition from form to form, and was that transition as much as the forms into which it passed. But if so, then since the content of the “System of Experience” was constituted by mind, the connexion between its parts which made the system possible is similarly constituted. In other words, the Phenomenology is self-constructed and self-determined. It is one and the same mind which fashions the many expressions of experience into a single connected context, and which owns them as its experience. There is, therefore, no separation between the matter of the system and its mode of constitution.

But it is clear from this that the method of construction must likewise pervade each part of the system as a part; that is, it must be the moving principle of each mode of experience. In fact, since experience from beginning to end is essentially a process, the method of connecting its elements is the essential nature of that process itself. It is immanent in each and all, and not transcendent. Hence of the last stage in the life of experience this also holds. In Absolute Knowledge, therefore, the process active throughout it is the same as the activity throughout all experience, and its method of operation is the same. Thus, then, we see that in virtue of Logic being a determinate mode of experience falling within the scope of the Phenomenology, its content and its method by their very constitution are one and the same reality.

Indeed, it is more evident in the case of Logic that this must be so.

For there, as we have just found, the mind’s self (universality) appears simply as universal, in the form of Notion. The self in such knowledge is the object of knowledge. Nothing falls inside such a mode of experience but the essential nature of mind. Hence the act of knowing and the content known, being moments of one and the same self, in one and the same mode of experience, the method (which determines the process of knowing) and the content which is its object, are indissoluble.

But if we bear in mind this inner unity of content and method, it becomes perfectly clear what the general nature of the method must be.

We find that the method operates not merely in the Phenomenology and the Logic, but also throughout the Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Mind, as also throughout subdivisions of these, such as the Philosophy of Law. And it operates throughout all these diverse phenomena solely in virtue of one fact – that they are all determinations of mind.

This is the single principle common to them all, and is the foundation of their reality. But if the method is likewise found in each and all of these various sciences, it must be because it is the essential nature of mind to operate in this way. Thus we arrive inevitably at this result – that the method is simply the inner activity of mind, itself the only and the necessary form which its procedure can take. Mind is essentially a living activity; experience is nothing if not the explicit expression of that activity.

But activity must take a definite and a self-consistent form if it is to be the activity of the same reality. The method is neither more nor less than the simple rhythm of that process, the measure to which the life of mind beats time. The method, therefore, cannot be external to mind, cannot determine its procedure from without, for it is precisely how mind really works. Mind is not a single unit in the scheme of things; it is the whole of experience. It must therefore hold its varied content together, arrange it, determine it, etc. And the way it connects its elements together is just its method of procedure in experience.

And now we see again why Hegel should have laid such stress on his philosophical method. He professes in the method to have found the essential rhythm of the movement of mind. But if this is known, then the last obstacle in the way of the construction of an absolute system is removed. For if we know the ultimate principle of experience, and also the way experience is organised by this principle, then clearly the goal of philosophy is within sight of attainment. There can be no doubt about the absoluteness of such a system, nor any hesitation about its finality at least in substance, if not in detail. Such a system gets rid entirely of “subjectivity,” of the errors which inevitably arise from arbitrariness in method and procedure. It is complete in itself and self-contained, because self-determined. In it alone do we have what all science and all philosophy aim at, completely objective knowledge. This method is the only condition of the possibility of such knowledge. Thus the method is essential to Hegel’s fundamental contentions. That Reality is Subject, that mind is the foundation of all experience, the reality of Absolute Idealism, the existence of objective knowledge – all these positions are indissolubly bound up with the truth of the method. In fact we may say that the method and these principles mutually imply each other. If the method can be admitted to operate, then Reality is Subject, and objective knowledge is obtained; while, again, to attain to objective knowledge is ipso facto to employ this method, and to assert that Reality is Subject.

But while the fundamental character of the method above stated makes it quite evident in a general way what the method professes to be, and is of supreme importance for the interpretation of it, we are not thereby assisted in determining how the method actually goes to work, more especially in Logic. For light on this we again turn to the Phenomenology.

We saw that the Logic dealt with the determining notions of all concrete experience, and that consequently in Logic we covered the same area of reality as was systematically connected in the Phenomenology (viz., all Reality itself), but considered solely the ultimate nature, the essential content of the various modes of experience. The content of the Phenomenology, therefore, is essentially the content of Logic, and the process of experience is at bottom a logical process. We are entitled to conclude, then, that what the method is in the Phenomenology it will also be in the Logic, and that its characteristic features as found in the former will have their counterpart, or, if we choose, their duplicate, in the latter. Now we saw that when the analysis of a given mode of experience brings to light the inner truth of that mode, a truth which is other than the actual truth possessed by that mode itself, the presence of this new truth to mind brings about and necessarily requires a change of attitude on the part of mind itself, a new mode of experience. The alteration of the ray of truth implies an alteration in the reflecting medium.

Thus when consciousness, after exhausting the meaning of mere Sense, finds its truth in a universal element in sense, e.g., a Quality, it signifies its attainment of this new truth by a new mode of conscious experience-perception.

It passes from the one stage to the other by a change of conscious attitude, an Umkehrung des Bewusstseins. This procedure must have its counterpart in Logic. It will correspond, in fact, to the change from one notion to another in the Logic. Thus the transition, the Uebergang, from notion to notion is the logical expression for the Umkehrung des Bewusstseins in the Phenomenology. The latter is the form in which mind passes from stage to stage and, in passing, connects stage with stage of its concrete experience; the former is the manner in which the moments of ultimate truth are built into the structure of Absolute Knowledge.

Now since this Umkehrung is the nerve of the process in the Phenomenology, we shall find the clue to the meaning of the “transition” from notion to notion in Logic in the procedure of the method in the Phenomenology. We cannot, of course, find a point-for-point similarity between them; for the content of the Phenomenology is not as it stands that of Logic. Each proceeds on its own account, and is self-contained.

Still, it is at least precisely the same general method which operates in each; and that method as found in the Phenomenology exhibits more palpably and clearly its modus operandi, simply because the content is there more concrete and tangible. We shall, therefore, allow the latter to throw as much light as possible on the “transition” in the Logic; and we shall feel the more justified in doing so when we reflect that it was undoubtedly the nature and the use of the method in the Phenomenology which originated the method in the form found in Logic.

The essential elements, then, in this “transition” to which we must call attention are (1) the idea of truth underlying Hegel’s procedure, (2) the kind of relation subsisting between the contents connected, and (3) the end attained by the transition.

Ordinary opinion and popular philosophy may not have any very precise conception of what it means by truth, but at least it considers that there is only one form and kind of truth, and that anything different from this is either not truth or is falsehood. This position may be taken up in different ways by different thinkers. Sometimes by truth is meant simply Scientific Truth. Morality in such a case is regarded as something occupying an entirely different sphere of experience; it is not concerned with truth, but with “instincts” or “impulses.” This may be said either by way of repudiating morality, or merely to exclude it from the area of truth. Similarly, again, Religion or Philosophy is on such a view excluded from “truth” – the former because it is “practical,” the latter because it deals with “ideas” only, not with “immediate facts.” Or, again, in scientific truth, only one phase of science is regarded as giving truth, namely, that in which the law or principle of the facts is stated. The mere facts are not truth, but “something given,” the “material” of truth.

Or further, in opposition to this, the view may be held that only the moral life gives “truth,” that science is at best systematised metaphor.

In any of these cases, and they are all examples of the same position, truth, strictly understood, is relegated to one area or attitude of experience; the rest of experience is simply excluded from it.

Now with all this Hegel’s conception of truth presents the most decided contrast. The root idea of the Phenomenology is that no one phase of experience is alone capable of containing truth. Every form of the life of mind has its own specific truth, which is only one of the rays which illuminate experience. None of these can exhaust the entire truth; for the full truth is the whole of experience, and each of them is only a moment of it. “The Truth,” as Hegel continually insists, “is the whole.” All forms of experience contribute to the expression of the truth, but truth cannot be exhaustively expressed by any one of them; only the full blaze of all experience can reveal the completeness of its glory. Not even does Absolute Knowledge profess to contain the entire truth.

Experience, therefore, according to Hegel, is too rich, and is in each phase too real, to be expressed by any one kind of truth. Truth is simply all experience. And it is not difficult to understand how, for Hegel, this should be so. Experience is constituted by the interrelation of subject and object; wherever we have this there we have an attitude of mind, and there consequently we have a form of truth, for “truth is agreement of mind with its object.” It is the one mind which stands related to diverse objects. Each relation is essential to it, and each contains its own truth. Hence only the manifold relations to its objects exhaust its life, and reveal its truth. The truth is the whole because only the whole exhausts the forms of activity of the one mind, which has experience.

Now with such a conception of truth there is only one way in which a comprehensive system of truth can be constructed. In the case of the ordinary view of truth above stated, system is obtained by determining the facts by a principle, and either rejecting what does not agree with it, or modifying the principle in such a way as to comprehend the facts.

But if, as in the present case, no phase of experience can be omitted, the only manner in which connexion is either possible or necessary is to show their inner relation simply as forms of experience. The truth of one does not cancel the truth of another; consequently to systematise them we must accept each at its worth, and weave them somehow into the seamless robe of the one Reality. The only alternative is to make a classification or a catalogue of the modes of experience. And, as we saw, Hegel accomplishes this systematisation by showing that the one mind present throughout experience connects its various attitudes in virtue of the fact that the explicit content of one is the implicit content of another (preceding) attitude. Mind passes necessarily to a new attitude in order to be fully aware of what was implied in the preceding. By this simple means, therefore, Hegel at once does justice to his conception of truth, and his demand for system. The Umkehrung des Bewusstseins is the nerve of the inner connexion of the content of the Phenomenology, and derives its meaning and importance from the idea of truth on which the “System of Experience” is based.

Hence the significance of “transition” in the Logic. It is the necessary condition of the realisation of a system which is to contain truth in the above sense. All its moments are to be truths, and itself is to be the whole organism of truth. It is to cover all experience, and is ipso facto the whole which is the truth; and it is to deal with the essential content, the inner notion of each mode, which because a form of experience is eo ipso true. The truth which is the whole is not something over and above the truths of experience; it is simply the latter in their unity. The only way to construct the system of such notions is to show their essential connexion as expressions of one and the same mind, which both is the specific notions as such, and itself is the movement from one to another.

And this is done when the notions “pass into” one another. The fact that we are dealing with ultimate notions, essential content, does not mean that these are complete in themselves, or that no connexion of them is possible. Though ultimate they are still realisations of that which is the ground reality of all of them, the self, and hence are necessarily related as forms of a single unity. Mind in each notion determines itself differently, but it is always the same self which is determined.

Such, then, being the purpose of “transition” from notion to notion, we next ask how exactly is the process brought about? what starts the movement? There is only one answer – the existence of opposition, discord, contradiction. All change, we may say, generally is due to disturbance of equilibrium within a given whole. We find this in a physical system where there is disparity between attraction and repulsion; or, again, in the conduct of life with its contrast of end and desire, attainment and actuality. It is so in all concrete human experience; in knowledge we see it where the consciousness of an ideal of explanation compels the scientist to accumulate his facts, to deepen his insight into their relations, to heal the gulf between discreteness and complete connectedness.

The very expression “search for truth” indicates a process which has its impulse in a felt contradiction. Now the Phenomenology showed how this contradiction appeared and was removed in the various stages of actual spiritual experience. The one mind which has experience only realises its complete life in the whole of experience. But in each mode in which it appears it is realising itself, for each is pro tanto experience.

Yet with nothing short of the whole of reality will it rest satisfied, only with the whole is it completely at home with itself. Hence the antithesis between the fulness of its completed life, and the insufficiency of any one special mode of it, both creates other modes in which it must realise itself and compels it to pass from a less sufficient to a more complete form of experience. This opposition, which operates perpetually through out concrete experience, and is absolutely necessary to it (because it is the same self whose life is realised both as universal and as special or particular), is the motive force which initiates and maintains the process of experience, and produces the continual conversion of conscious attitude (Umkehrung) which appears throughout it.

And the process in Logic is similarly constituted. Here we deal with the ultimate content of the self; but it is one and the same self which determines itself in diverse ultimate (i.e., distinct and irreducible) forms.

It is only really itself when its entire content is exhaustively expressed, when its whole self in its universality is the self which it knows. Anything short of this will not be a notion adequate to its essential nature.

Hence the contrast between its complete essential reality and a determinate essential notion compels that one mind, which possesses both and realises itself in both, to leave its inadequate realisation and proceed to a more complete expression. This process is inevitable if the same mind must (and does) seek to express its self in its entirety, and at the same time in a special form. The one being as essential to its nature as the other, each in fact being its own essence, the opposition between these two forms of its self is inseparable from its very life; and with that opposition the process, the “transition,” which it creates and necessitates.

We must not regard the notions as entities somehow created by but external to the self; they are the self in its essential form. And since they all express its life, the contrast between the more adequate notion and the less adequate is really the contrast between the self more completely and less completely expressed. Hence the change from notion to notion.

But we must here guard against an error of interpretation. This “transition” is not brought about at each stage by opposing the full tide of the self to a single wave of its truth. This is at once unnecessary, and hardly possible. It is sufficient to produce the alteration, if greater completeness in any sense and to any degree is contrasted with less. It is absurd to suppose that the entire life of mind is explicitly opposed to each determinate notion. What we really have is some implicit totality along-side an explicit mode or phase of it. The mere determinateness of the notion itself involves this implication. We do not have before us explicitly the notion of “Becoming” when we are dealing with the determinate notion of “Being”; this would already assume the actual presence of what is to be shown to be a result after a process. If this, indeed, were the modus operandi, it would be little better than a mere pretence.

We only become aware of the notion which is more complete but implicit after making it explicit through this process. The fact that it is this notion and not another which is the result produced, shows that this was implied in the notion from which we started. The one mind knows both the explicit and implicit notion, for it knows in experience the totality determined by them both. But it, so to say, does not bring out the implicit notion till the explicit has been exhausted, does not feel the need of the more complete till the less complete has actually been found insufficient.

The self is of course aware of the concrete reality of which all notions are determinations; for, since Logic is the “after-thought” of experience itself, it presupposes the concrete life of mind described in the Phenomenology, where we have already made use of the notions systematised in the Logic. But since Logic is a kind of knowledge sui generis, the process of the Logic starts de novo. The self in the Logic does not simply gather notions miscellaneously and ask how these are to be put together to form a whole. On the contrary, it does not really know what is the notion which is more adequate until it has by analytical scrutiny brought out the meaning of that notion which is less complete.

When the latter is exhausted, then the more adequate comes to light, proceeds out of it; i.e., the one mind “passes over” from one realisation of its self to another.

So much, then, regarding the “transition” from notion to notion.

The foregoing now leads us to consider the kind of relation subsisting between the notions in this process. That relation is briefly what Hegel calls “negation,” “negativity.” The meaning of this important conception cannot, after what has been said, remain very obscure. We must again recall the fact, already emphasised, that the notions are the self in determinate ultimate form, and are concrete (in the sense explained).

They are not bare “ideas,” but the essential meaning of actual experience.

Now, since they are all necessary to experience, necessary to express the full meaning of mind, the self is unable to dispense with any.

Its process from one to other does not therefore mean that it abandons, or annihilates, the notion from which it passes; it must still in some way take the latter into the new notion, for this notion proceeded from and arose out of the other. The self, however, is now realised in a new and more complete expression of itself; it was for this reason that it made the transition from the other notion. And in this lies the meaning of the “negation” of one notion by another. “Negation” does not here mean simple exclusion, as, e.g., light excludes darkness, as A excludes not-A.

The negative is always determinate in itself, is not mere negation, but has a specific meaning of its own. It is negative of something. Hence what such a negative will be depends on what is negated. In the negation the “something” is still implied and contained. The process from one to the other involves this; for the first notion, the transition itself, and the new notion are all continuous with one another; they are phases of the life of one and the same self, which must express itself in and through all of them. It was in this sense that negation was conceived in the Phenomenology, when, e.g., Morality “passed into” Religion, or Sense-consciousness into Perception. The latter did not exclude the former. To do so would have been to lose a part of experience. It would also render the later form itself meaningless; for Perception, e.g., without Sensation is impossible. Because Sensation is a mode of experience it cannot be destroyed; but because Perception realises more fully the relation of the self to external (sense) objects, mind leaves mere sense for Perception; it “negates” sense. The negation of sense is, therefore, not the destruction of it, but the preservation of it in another form, a form more conformable to the mind’s essential nature. Negation is not annihilation, but sublation (Aufhebung). So in the pure notions of Logic. When a notion “negates” another, it determines it still further. All negation is simply determination. It is the same self which must realise itself in all these notions, and all realisation is necessarily positive.

But if this is the essential character of the relation of one notion to another, why is this called “negation"? How can a notion be shown to be the “other” of another notion? In short, how is “otherness,” as distinct from simple difference, determined? For the answer we must refer again to the nature of the self which is the ground of the notions. The self, as we saw, embraced all experience, and is conscious of self in so doing.

Hence it contains in itself all diversity, and yet is conscious of that diversity as its own, as its self. It is at once the source of the plurality and opposition found in experience, and the unity of all opposites. This it must be to constitute one experience. The self is therefore necessarily both the identity and the diversity, the unity and the plurality, which together make experience what it is. But these are the very type and form of all opposition whatsoever, and they are the cardinal antithesis of reality, for they both constitute and give meaning to all the diversity it contains. And, moreover, opposition is the essential nature of the terms themselves. Identity only has significance, only is by being set against difference; and difference has no meaning except in opposition to an identity. Their very existence involves their antithesis; they are locked in ceaseless conflict to prevent each from committing suicide. Thus, then, we see that the deepest opposition in experience lies rooted in the concrete life of the self. Self-consciousness, which is the nature of mind, just consists in unity in diversity. To be conscious of self necessitates distinction, while to be conscious of self asserts an identity throughout the whole process.

And what is thus true of concrete experience is true of the notions in Logic. The notions are the self in its essential and ultimate form. A notion, therefore, is the unity of identity and diversity; it is one and the same, and yet has content, is different. This is involved in the “concreteness” of the notions already explained. They are not “abstract” or “formal” thoughts; they are constitutive of experience, because determinate moments of the self which moulds experience. Now it is in this opposition of elements, which lies in the very nature of every notion, that we are to find the source of the “negative,” the “other” of a given notion.

The “other” would not be an other unless it implied an identity of content between itself and that with which it stood in contrast; and, again, it would not be an other if its content were absolutely identical with its opposite. Thus the notion in its diversity is the “other” of the notion in its identity (and conversely), because it is one and the same content which exists in these two forms. The notion qua identical is necessarily opposed to, is the “other” of the notion qua diverse. That it is the same notion throughout does not make this contrast either meaningless or impossible. It would be meaningless if identity were not as such distinct from diversity, and it would be impossible if there were not contrasted elements in each notion. On the other hand, again, it is because in each case we deal with one and the same notion that a given notion has only one “other” and that therefore there can only be one step from one notion to its negative. A notion qua identity can only be opposed to itself qua diversity. These are its only and its essential elements. A negative can, therefore, only be either of those, according to the element we start from. And this is in part the source of the “necessity” in the construction, to which we shall refer presently.

It must be noted that this process of determining negativity applies not merely to the content of any given notion, but also in the same way to the relation of all the notions in the Logic. We evolve notion from notion by the same principle by which we determine the constitutive elements of a given notion; for the Ego, which is the life of all the no tions, bears the same relation to the diverse content of the Logic as a whole which one notion holds to the elements it contains; it is the same self which is being determined from first to last. One notion, therefore, is the negative, the “other” of another notion in virtue of the same fundamental opposition which is operative in every notion. And, again, what the negative shall be depends entirely on the notion. The notions are all moments of the Ego, but they are not the same in content. The process from one to another, therefore, while determined in the same formal manner, cannot produce the same result. In one case, e.g., we have the antithesis of Quality and Quantity, in another of Essence and Appearance, or, again, of Mechanism and Chemism – all constituted by the same ultimate relationship, but all differing in content. We must therefore determine the connexion of one notion with another by reference to the specific content of each notion.

From the foregoing we can easily understand the course pursued by the method. We begin with the notion simply as a notion; we take it in its mere self-identity, its bare universality. This is necessarily the first moment, because the notion is primarily a universal, a self-identity. But this first moment already implies the second. For to take the notion as mere universality is to determine it, and determination is only possible by reference to another moment. Determination because specific implies contrast, opposition, negation. We have therefore as our second moment the antithesis, the negative of the first, explicitly stated – diversity, particularity. This is found merely by making clear what was contained in the first; it is the result of analysis. But, again, this moment necessitates a third. For now we have the two constitutive moments of the motion over against each other; each is negative of the other; the first is the other of the second just as much as the second is of the first.

The notion is split into a relation of negatives, of terms, each of which is negative to the other; it is in complete inner contradiction with its self.

But this tension of opposite elements does not lead to the disruption of the notion. The fact that these opposites exist in the same notion demands and emphasises the necessity for that unity in which they exist as opposites. Mere diversity of content and complete opposition of elements requires the reassertion of that unity which makes their opposition possible. Here negation itself calls for negation, and indeed implies its own negative – namely, the underlying unity. The third moment is therefore the reinstatement of the identity, the universal, the positive.

For, like the first negative, this third step (negation of the negative) is not bare negation, but determinate negation, negation of definite diversity, and this means assertion of positive unity. This last step, being due to the relation of one moment to the other, can be regarded as a synthesis, in contrast with the former analytic moment. But we cannot consider this contrast as absolute, for it is clear that in each case we have both analysis and synthesis. In the first we have synthesis, for the relation of the “other” to the immediate identity from which we start is essentially synthetic. In the second we have analysis, for its aim and result is to bring out the unity underlying the opposed elements. The method from first to last is at once synthetic and analytic; the difference between the moments is one of emphasis only. In the first negation we establish more directly by analysis of the original identity, a diversity implied in it. In the second we insist more particularly on the synthesis of the elements ostensibly opposed, and bring out their unity.

Such then, stated simply and shortly, is the actual procedure of the method from step to step in the Logic. If we bear in mind that these various moments arise from the nature of the self which moulds experience, and are due solely to the assertion and counter-assertion of the diverse constitutive elements in its single concrete reality, the process ceases to be the obscure enigma which it is so often considered. It is the same Ego which is operative from first to last, and this determines its every moment; for the moments of the method are the rhythmic systolation of self-consciousness. This determines the meaning and purpose of “negation,” which may be regarded as the nerve of the process. Not merely in each notion, then, but from beginning to end of the Logic, precisely the same procedure determines the construction of the system. It operates in diverse content, for the notions are different at each stage; but it is always the same formal procedure, for it is the same self which realises itself in each notion. By this means, therefore, the main parts of Logic (Being, Essence, and Notion) are determined, no less than each category at the various stages of the process. The nature of the beginning as well as the end of the system are likewise discovered by the same law.

We cannot, however, state how in detail these stages are determined.

To do so would in fact require a reconstruction of the whole system. We can only point out the sources from which Hegel drew the various notions of the Logic. These are – (1) the Phenomenology; (2) Language, which he regarded as the embodiment of notions; (3) the different Sciences with which he had long been acquainted; (4) the History of Philosophy. We cannot maintain that the Logic is constructed simply by repeating in abstracto the life of experience – this idea we have already dismissed; but, on the other hand, we must not suppose that Hegel’s Logic sprang bodily out of his own mind. This would, indeed, make Hegel either a superb conjurer or else the creator of the world – according as we regard the result. Hegel had experience behind and before him, and out of this by the severe struggle of reflexion he shaped his system.

The Phenomenology, as we saw, is the presupposition of the Logic, and unquestionably guided Hegel to some extent in the construction of it. Thus the beginning of the Logic may be said to give the ultimate notion underlying Sense-experience – that of mere immediacy (the beginning of the Phenomenology). The immediate determination of the Ego is simply that it is; its primary notion is mere Being. In concrete experience, sense, the first mode of consciousness, is that which is merely felt; and mere feeling is immediacy pure and simple. So, again, the end of the Phenomenology is Absolute Knowledge, and in the Logic the last notion is just the notion of Logic itself, the notion of Absolute Knowledge, the Absolute Idea. No doubt in such cases the notions of the Logic were directly suggested by the argument in the Phenomenology.

But such a parallelism cannot be pressed far, and certainly cannot be found in detail.

Language, again, enabled Hegel in no slight degree to discover the categories – so much so that in some cases the analysis seems not logical but etymological, and the interpretation of a notion the mere recording of its current or historical signification. For Hegel language embodied the thought of human experience. “Language has compressed within it what man has made his own, and what he has fashioned and expressed in speech contains, either embedded or elaborated, a category: so natural does Logic come to him, or rather it is his own very nature." And Hegel regarded the uncorrupted Teutonic of his own mother tongue as peculiarly adapted to reveal those ultimate conceptions which he sought, while at the same time he renounced any affectation of purism, any supposition that the German language was the only authorised medium for the communication of absolute truth. He thus found the material of Logic, to a large extent, already to hand in the language and literature of his countrymen, and hence had to create neither the notions nor the terminology in which to express them. He had merely to re-discover their meaning and connect them systematically. Neither the substance nor the form of the Logic was, therefore, regarded by him as esoteric. “Philosophy,” as he says, “requires no special terminology”; and again, “the object-matter of Logic and its expression are the common stock of knowledge.” His Logic can thus be regarded in a sense as a systematic analysis of the abstract terms of ordinary speech. To Science Hegel was also largely indebted in the construction of the Logic. The system does not deal with a peculiar order of ideas, but with current ideas in a peculiar way; nor is the system spun on the loom of Hegel’s mind without any acquaintance on his part with the facts to which the notions referred. It would certainly be absurd to attempt to substitute omniscience for the want of science, or to make up for ignorance of the actual world with its throbbing activity, by becoming a past master in the knowledge of a world with which we have no concern. Far from this being true, Hegel’s Logic is the outgrowth of a prolonged study of science and no slight familiarity with its facts and principles.

And, indeed, such or similar knowledge must be possessed before the student is able fully to appreciate the analysis of the notions dealt with by the science of Logic. The notions because concrete must carry with them all the meaning attached to them by ordinary Science. His knowledge, therefore, of scientific conceptions furnished Hegel with precisely the formed material required for the Logic.

Finally, it is impossible to ignore the assistance derived from the History of Philosophy in the discovery and connexion of the categories.

Hegel had long held that there is in the last resort but one philosophy which lives throughout the whole of its history, that philosophy is a necessary spiritual expression of mankind and not a collection of casual opinions. If to this we add his other view that there is but one Reason, one Spirit operating in human history, moulding its direction by an inner necessity, we can see how easy it was for Hegel to regard the History of Philosophy as realising at various stages determinate notions of Reason, as dealing with specific determinations of the Absolute. The principle of each so-called system is an ultimate notion, and therefore an element in Absolute Truth. And not merely so, but the relation of system to system in the course of the History of Philosophy points to the kind of connexion which subsists between notions. A succeeding system does not annihilate its predecessor, it lays emphasis on a new truth, corrects its “one-sidedness,” and more completely realises the whole truth. This is acknowledged by each system which aims at construction, and was in fact an obvious conclusion to draw from the history of systems, each of which professed to express truth. But such a relation between one thinker and another undoubtedly suggested not merely the kind of connexion which existed amongst categories, but the actual order of that connexion.

There was an inner necessity governing the history of philosophy, which compelled a certain system to appear after another. This inner necessity lay in the nature of Reason. Hence Hegel had already in concreto the order of the categories expressly determinated by the natural and, in a sense, unconscious process of Reason itself. All that he required was to lift the notions represented in the various systems into their simple abstraction and express their connexion in its ultimate form.

Thus, e.g., we have the course of early speculation embodied in the notions Being, Nothing, and Becoming; while in later thought, again, Substance, Causality, and Reciprocity represent the historical sequence of Spinozism, Kant, and Fichte. But again, as in the case of the relation of Logic to the Phenomenology, while the connexion between Logic and the History of Philosophy is direct and profound, a complete parallelism cannot be established between the course of the one and that of the other. We come now to the last question concerning the method: what is the end of the process itself? The end is, in a word, Self-knowledge. The purpose of the Logic from first to last is to make explicit and systematic the ultimate content of the Absolute Self; and the goal to which it tends is simply. exhaustive knowledge of the Absolute. This determines the process at every step and gives it continuity; for it is the same self which is active in the method at each stage, which defines each notion and passes to its negative. And herein lies the inner necessity of the construction.

It is impossible for the knowledge to be complete unless the various moments of the self are passed in review. Self-knowledge requires that there shall not be, and cannot be, a leap from an inadequate notion to a completely adequate. The self does not correct the incompleteness of one notion by a fully complete notion, simply because it does not know the fully complete till it has passed through all the more or less complete. Hence the advance is not made by the Ego bringing all the riches of its life to shame the poverty of any single notion; it is by exhausting the content of one notion that the need is felt for passing to another. Every moment of the Ego must therefore be known before full self-knowledge is obtained, for every notion is a truth, and every truth is essential to its life. And this completeness is secured when, by inner necessity, the self finds each moment of advance in the immediately preceding. Completeness of knowledge, therefore, implies the compactness of a necessary connexion.

But this process is not merely one in which the self gradually exhausts its own content; its goal is the attainment of a notion in which self-knowledge is adequately and fully realised. This must be the final result, because the advance from one notion to another is determined by the fact that the notions express with different degrees of completeness the self which realises itself throughout the whole process. Each notion negates, and in negating contains the other, is more concrete than it; the self is, therefore, more fully realised in the later than the preceding notion.

But if so, the final notion must be at once complete self-knowledge and one determinate notion among others. Now this is only possible on one condition – the process must be that of Development, of Evolution.

We found in the Phenomenology that each stage led onwards towards the final truth of experience, whose mind was completely at home with itself – Absolute Knowledge. Each mode had its value and place determined by reference to this end, and each gathered into itself the truth of the preceding. So in the Logic. The last notion contains the truth of all the preceding, and is itself the absolute notion of complete self-knowledge.

This notion Hegel calls the Absolute Idea. But if this notion contains the whole of what precedes, if that is its specific content, then it is clear that the Absolute Idea is simply the notion of the Science of Logic, the notion of Absolute Self-knowledge. This notion, because the final notion, looks back to what has preceded for its content; while again, since every notion is an ultimate realisation of mind, none can be excluded from the idea of its self-knowledge. Hence the Absolute Idea is the Logic itself expressed as a single notion. And such is Hegel’s explicit interpretation of it. If we recall the conclusion of the Phenomenology, we shall see that this result is inevitable. For if Logic is to state the ultimate content of all experience, then the ultimate truth of mind can only be the notion of Absolute Truth itself, i.e., the notion of Absolute Knowledge with which the Phenomenology concludes. But again, such a result is the consistent outcome of the whole Logic. That science aimed at complete self-knowledge.

But self-knowledge, when attained, is a determinate realisation of mind, is a determinate notion; the end is, therefore, attained in the notion of that end itself. The ideal of self-knowledge is realised only in the notion of that ideal, for all other notions are approximative, and only such a notion focusses in a unity all the scattered rays of truth. The complete tale of the notions can only be finished by the notion of the whole which has been passed in review.

But this result must not be misunderstood. We must bear in mind that throughout Logic we are dealing with a concrete reality-mind. We are evolving its content. Hence the self-knowledge attained is not an external knowledge of mind; it is the realisation of a concrete self. The end, therefore, is not bare knowledge, but the development of a spiritual reality. The Absolute Idea is the self-manifestation of Absolute Spirit; it is Supreme Personality explicitly determined. The Absolute Idea is Absolute Subject known in the form of its self (as notion). The course of the Logic is the progressive determination of itself by Absolute Subject; the Absolute Idea being the whole Logic, is the exhaustive statement of the Absolute. The Logic is thus at the same time Metaphysic. The process of the Logic does not merely lay bare in extenso the ultimate content of experience; it is also the ever-deepening penetration into the nature of the Absolute. So that with the end we have at once the greatest extent of reality and intensity of meaning, most comprehensive objectivity and deepest subjectivity. As Hegel puts it, “das Reichste ist daher das Concreteste und Subjectiviste, und das sich in die einfachste Tiefe Zurhcknehmende das Mächtigste und Uebergreifendste. Die h’chste zugeschärfteste Spitze ist die reine Pers’nlichkeit die allein durch die absolute Dialektik... alles in sich befaszt und hält...” The logical expression for this Supreme Personality is the Absolute Idea, which is the “only object and content of philosophy," and of which Logic is “the self-movement.” Such, then, is the method of the Logic in its origin, its process, and its end. There is perhaps no single term which completely expresses all that it means. The term Dialectic describes one essential element in it – the process of negativity by which it operates. Dialectical the method unquestionably is, not in the sense of discovering and establishing contradictions, but in the sense of thinking and resolving them. Dialectic is the method of reason, and reason is negative, for it is infinite and, therefore, the negation of finitude. And, again, contradiction lies in the very heart of the notion. “To think contradiction is the essential moment of a notion”; while to resolve contradiction is the very condition of truth, and the very life of spirit. Such a dialectic method is the only one possible for Absolute Idealism; for only mind, free self-conscious subject, can negate, and in negating remain positive and unite the contradictory elements. It is only by such a process that a person is subject, is free and self-conscious. Dialectic is the kernel of true individuality and the ground of Absolute Truth, for “upon it rests the possibility of removing the opposition between notion and reality, and establishing their unity which is truth." But, on the other hand, “Dialectic” can hardly be said to exhaust the meaning of the method. For (1), e.g., the beginning is established by the method, and the beginning is not itself a negative; (2) the negative is only one aspect of the content; every notion is likewise positive; (3) the process as a whole is a development, and a development is at least as much positive as negative. Dialectic, in short, only lays emphasis on one feature in the method – the immanent reference of one content to another.

The process may also be quite accurately described as the Union of Analysis and Synthesis. These are in ordinary knowledge distinct forms of procedure, and together they exhaust all possible methods of knowing.

In speculative knowledge they are combined, for there we deal from first to last with the whole, with the individual concrete reality, which is essentially a unity of identity and difference. And here again we see that only when the self is the supreme principle of the system can such a method be applied; for mind is itself the concrete unity of identity and difference.

Again, we may regard it as a continuous application of the Syllogism.

For the process is essentially mediate; its whole purpose is to leave nothing standing as a mere immediate, but relate each element to some other, and so mediate its truth with another. Only thus is complete systematic construction possible; but mediation is essentially syllogistic and inferential. And since by such a process the result attained is a conclusion, is deduced from a beginning, the method can also be called Deduction. The Triplicity, however, which is constitutive of the syllogism and characteristic of the method, cannot be absolutely insisted upon, for this is purely external; the process might well enough be regarded as a Quadruplicity. Finally, it may simply be regarded as the realisation of the successive moments of Self-reflexion. We have first the self in its immediacy, the notion in itself; then its distinction from itself, the notion for itself; and lastly, the completely explicit and concrete notion, the notion in itself and for itself. These are the moments of every notion, and every notion is a realisation of the self-conscious Subject.

All these aspects of the method are equally important; and each throws a separate light on the character of the process.