Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/185

HEGEL'S TREATMENT OF THE CATEGORIES OF THE IDEA. 171 the Logic. For they relate to the application of the principles of the Logic to a subject-matter more or less empirical, and anything empirical must be excluded from the Logic proper. Any discussion of such questions, which aspires to be any- thing more than the merest Schwarmerei, must indeed be based upon the Logic. But it must go beyond the Logic, and the empirical element in its subject-matter will always prevent it from claiming that necessity of demonstration which is the ideal of the Logic. Let us take for examples the problems of our own immortality, and of the personality of God. Any serious discussion of these must, for any inquirer who accepts the dialectic, be based on the nature of the Absolute Idea. But the conceptions of immortality, of myself, of personality, and of God, contain more than pure thought, and require treatment less rigid, and yielding results less certain, than we find when we are dealing with the categories of the dialectic. We may notice, to begin with, that we are entitled to say that the nature of each individual is that all individuals shall be for it, and, therefore, that it shall be in harmony with all those individuals. For we saw before the nature of each individual was that the unity should be for it. Now the unity is manifested, and completely manifested, in the individuals. And therefore we may substitute the individuals for the unity, and say that it is the individuals which are in harmony with each individual. It may be objected to this substitution that it does not do justice to the unity. It is not, it may be said with truth, the case that the unity is equivalent to the individuals in isolation, or as a mere aggregate, or as a mechanically de- termined whole. It is not equivalent to the individuals when they are joined in precisely this vital and all-embracing unity. To say that the unity is equivalent to the individuals would be to ignore this. To this objection, as to a previous one, I should reply that it is the objection itself, and not the theory which fails to do justice to the vitality of the unity, and falls into atomism. For the objection assumes that the individuals would have some existence, or one at any rate conceivable, if taken as isolated, or as aggregated, or as mechanically determined. Now this is just what the dialectic, if it has done anything at all, has disproved. It has shown, not only that the individuals are in fact connected in such an intimate unity, but that it is essential to their nature that they should be, and that if they were not connected in this particular way, they would not be individuals at all. To say