but to make explicit those justificatory notions which condition
the form of our apprehension. “However much we may
presuppose an original reference of the forms of thought to that
nature of things which is the goal of knowledge, we must be prepared
to find in them many elements which do not directly reproduce
the actual reality to the knowledge of which they are to lead
us.”[1] The impulse of thought to reduce coincidence to coherence
reaches immediately only to objectivity or validity. The sense
in which the presupposition of a further reference is to be interpreted
and in which justificatory notions for it can be adduced
is only determinable in a philosophic system as a whole, where
feeling has a place as well as thought, value equally with validity.
Lotze’s logic then represents the statical aspect of the function of thought in knowledge, while, so far as we go in knowledge thought is always engaged in the unification of a manifold, which remains contradistinguished from it, though not, of course, completely alien to and unadapted to it. The further step to the determination of the ground of harmony is not to be taken in logic, where limits are present and untranscended.
The position of the search for truth, for which knowledge is a growing organism in which thought needs, so to speak, to feed on something other than itself, is conditioned in the post-Kantian period by antagonism to the speculative movement which culminated in the dialectic of Hegel. Logic as Metaphysic. The radical thought of this movement was voiced in the demand of Reinhold[2] that philosophy should “deduce” it all from a single principle and by a single method. Kant’s limits that must needs be thought and yet cannot be thought must be thought away. An earnest attempt to satisfy this demand was made by Fichte whose single principle was the activity of the pure Ego, while his single method was the assertion of a truth revealed by reflection on the content of conscious experience, the characterization of this as a half truth and the supplementation of it by its other, and finally the harmonization of both. The pure ego is inferred from the fact that the non-ego is realized only in the act of the ego in positing it. The ego posits itself, but reflection on the given shows that we must add that it posits also the non-ego. The two positions are to be conciliated in the thought of reciprocal limitation of the posited ego and non-ego. And so forth. Fichte cannot be said to have developed a logic, but this rhythm of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, foreshadowed in part for Fichte in Spinoza’s formula, “omnis determinatio est negatio” and significantly in Kant’s triadic grouping of his categories, gave a cue to the thought of Hegel. Schelling, too, called for a single principle and claimed to have found it in his Absolute, “the night” said Hegel, “in which all cows are black,” but his historical influence lay, as we have seen, in the direction of a parallelism within the unity, and he also developed no logic. It is altogether otherwise with Hegel.
Hegel’s logic,[3] though it involves inquiries which custom regards as metaphysical, is not to be characterized as a metaphysic with a method. It is logic or a rationale of thought by thought, with a full development among other matters of all that the most separatist of logicians regards Hegel. as thought forms. It offers a solution of what has throughout appeared as the logical problem. That solution lies doubtless in the evolution of the Idea, i.e. an all-inclusive in which mere or pure thought is cancelled in its separateness by a transfiguration, while logic is nothing but the science of the Idea viewed in the medium of pure thought. But, whatever else it be, this Panlogismus, to use the word of J. E. Erdmann, is at least a logic. Thought in its progressive unfolding, of which the history of philosophy taken in its broad outline offers a pageant, necessarily cannot find anything external to or alien from itself, though that there is something external for it is another matter. As Fichte’s Ego finds that its non-ego springs from and has its home within its very self, so with Hegel thought finds itself in its “other,” both subsisting in the Idea which is both and neither. Either of the two is the all, as, for example, the law of the convexity of the curve is the law of the curve and the law of its concavity. The process of the development of the Idea or Absolute is in one regard the immanent process of the all. Logically regarded, i.e. “in the medium of mere thought,” it is dialectical method. Any abstract and limited point of view carries necessarily to its contradictory. This can only be atoned with the original determination by fresh negation in which a new thought-determination is born, which is yet in a sense the old, though enriched, and valid on a higher plane. The limitations of this in turn cause a contradiction to emerge, and the process needs repetition. At last, however, no swing into the opposite, with its primarily conflicting, if ultimately complementary function, is any longer possible. That in which no further contradiction is possible is the absolute Idea. Bare or indeterminate being, for instance, the first of the determinations of Hegel’s logic, as the being of that which is not anything determinate, of Kant’s thing-in-itself, for example, positively understood, implicated at once the notion of not-being, which negates it, and is one with it, yet with a difference, so that we have the transition to determinate being, the transition being baptized as becoming. And so forth. It is easy to raise difficulties not only in regard to the detail in Hegel’s development of his categories, especially the higher ones, but also in regard to the essential rhythm of his method. The consideration that mere double negation leaves us precisely where we were and not upon a higher plane where the dominant concept is richer, is, of course, fatal only to certain verbal expressions of Hegel’s intent. There is a differentiation in type between the two negations. But if we grant this it is no longer obviously the simple logical operation indicated. It is inferred then that Hegel complements from the stuff of experience, and fails to make good the pretension of his method to be by itself and of itself the means of advance to higher and still higher concepts till it can rest in the Absolute. He discards, as it were, and takes in from the stock while professing to play from what he has originally in his hand. He postulates his unity in senses and at stages in which it is inadmissible, and so supplies only a schema of relations otherwise won, a view supported by the way in which he injects certain determinations in the process, e.g. the category of chemism. Has he not cooked the process in the light of the result? In truth the Hegelian logic suffers from the fact that the good to be reached is presupposed in the beginning. Nature, e.g., is not deduced as real because rational, but being real its rationality is presumed and, very imperfectly, exhibited in a way to make it possible to conceive it as in its essence the reflex of Reason. It is a vision rather than a construction. It is a “theosophical logic.” Consider the rational-real in the unity that must be, and this is the way of it, or an approximation to the way of it! It was inevitable that the epistemologists of the search for truth would have none of it. The ideal in whatsoever sense real still needs to be realized. It is from the human standpoint regulative and only hypothetically or formally constitutive. We must not confuse οὐσία with εἶναι, nor εἶναι with γίγνεσθαι.
Yet in a less ambitious form the fundamental contentions of Hegel’s method tend to find a qualified acceptance. In any piece of presumed knowledge its partial or abstract character involves the presence of loose edges which force the conviction of inadequacy and the development of contradictions. Contradictions must be annulled by complementation, with resultant increasing coherence in ascending stages. At each successive stage in our progress fresh contradictions break out, but the ideal of a station at which the thought-process and its other, if not one, are at one, is permissible as a limiting conception. Yet if Hegel meant only this he has indeed succeeded in concealing his meaning.
Hegel’s treatment of the categories or thought determinations which arise in the development of the immanent dialectic is rich in flashes of insight, but most of them are in the ordinary
- ↑ Logic, Introd. § ix.
- ↑ For whom see Höffding, History of Modern Philosophy, Eng. trans., vol. ii. pp. 122 sqq.; invaluable for the logical methods of modern philosophers.
- ↑ Wissenschaft der Logik (1812–1816), in course of revision at Hegel’s death in 1831 (Werke, vols. iii.-v.), and Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, i.; Die Logik (1817; 3rd ed., 1830); Werke, vol. vi., Eng. trans., Wallace (2nd ed., 1892).
