Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/331

III. THE ORDER OF THE HEGELIAN CATE- GORIES IN THE HEGELIAN ARGUMENT. BY MAEY WHITON CALKINS. THE tendency of Hegel's immediate followers to regard the categories from the standpoint of Hegel himself has been followed by a sweeping reaction. Instead of teaching that each category is inevitable, and that it must occupy precisely its own position in the line, modern commentators usually hold that the order of the categories is arbitrary and artificial ; that the choice of the categories proceeds on historical, and even in large measure on empirical grounds; and that the study of Hegel's Logic possesses therefore a chiefly anti- quarian interest. It seems probable that the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. On the one hand, nobody can read either the larger Logic or the Logic of the Encyclopedia, without the conviction that what is regarded as progress is often mere repetition : in " Essence," for example, the cate- gories of Force and Manifestation, Inner and Outer, Ground and Consequent, are merely co-ordinate names for the same pair of distinctions and do not in the least justify Hegel's claim by growing out of each other, as successive transcend- ences of opposition. More than this, identical categories, under different names, appear not merely in close succession, but at essentially different stages of the argument. Thus Identity and Difference, categories of "Essence," are barely distinguishable from Eeality and Negation which belong to "Being"; and Mechanism, a category of "Notion," turns out to have the precise characteristics of the earlier categories, Cause and Effect and Eeciprocity. But to admit the presence of needless steps and of puzzling iterations is not to deny all value to Hegel's argument. Not merely Hegel's result, but his method of attaining it is of permanent value ; and in some modification or another, his argument must be retraced