Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/159

NEW SERIES. No. 34.] [APRIL, 1900. MIND A QUARTERLY REVIEW OF PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY. I. HEGEL'S TREATMENT OF THE CATE- GORIES OF THE IDEA. BY J. ELLIS MCTAGGABT. THE Idea occupies, in Hegel's Logic, the third division of the Doctrine of the Notion, and concludes the dialectic process. It is divided into stages entitled Life, Cognition and the Absolute Idea. The first two of these are again subdivided. I shall, however, endeavour to show that the subdivisions which Hegel makes in the category of Life are unnecessary, and, indeed, unjustifiable. The Idea is, of course, the Synthesis of the Subjective and Objective Notions. But this Synthesis is not new to us, since it has already taken shape in Teleology, the last category of the Objective Notion. That this should be the case is in conformity with the general notion of the dialectic process, since the Thesis of each triad is only a restatement, in a more "immediate" form, of the Synthesis of the triad preceding. The conception which we reached in the category of Teleology was that reality was a unity dif- ferentiated into a plurality (or a plurality combined into a unity) in such a way that the whole meaning and significance of the unity lies in its being differentiated into that plurality, and that the whole meaning and significance of the parts of the plurality lies in their being combined into that unity. LIFE. The new category that of Life has exactly this meaning over again. Indeed it would be difficult to find a transition 10