Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/333

HEGELIAN CATEGORIES IN THE HEGELIAN ARGUMENT. 319 teaching about Brahma, the Eleatic doctrine of Pure Being, and Schelling's later conception of the Absolute as Pure Indifference. Such a theory makes metaphysics, the study of ultimate reality, impossible ; for it is futile to study the nature of that which is, by hypothesis, without attributes or determinations. It is unnecessary to consider in detail Hegel's treatment of this theory, in the first section of book i. of the Logic, for all commentators are agreed in their reading of his argument. He opposes the theory of an utterly undetermined Absolute, or Pure Being, by such an analysis of the concept as discloses its inner contradictions. For Pure Being, entire indeterminateness, Hegel shows would be utter absence of reality, Pure Nothing ; l whereas ultimate, or complete, reality can never be truly described as bare nothing, since, at the very least, the reality of the present moment exists. Therefore, because it is not entirely indeterminate, ultimate reality is in some sense qualified or determined ; and the effort of metaphysics to discover the nature of this determined, ultimate reality is justified. Distinct from this theory of the Absolute as undetermined reality, yet also very closely allied to it, is another doctrine which would make a positive metaphysics impossible. This is the conception, emphasised and enforced by Kant, of the ultimate reality as unknowable. On this Kantian theory of the limitation of knowledge, all that we know is ipso facto bound by the forms and limitations of human consciousness ; and attainment of the ultimate or absolute reality is utterly impossible. Such absolute reality becomes, therefore, un- knowable. Hegel discusses this doctrine in many sections of the first two divisions, "Essence" and "Appearance," of book ii. of the Logic. He makes use of ontological and of cosmological, rather than of epistemological, terms to express the relation of) Appearance to Essence, of Existence to Ground, of Form to Matter or of Manifestation to Force. But by these parallel se^s of terms he means, fundamentally, what Kant had meant by knowable and unknowable ; 2 and the main outlines of his argument against Kant are very clear. He shows first, that the knowable phenomenon appearance or manifestation implies of necessity the bare existence of 1 Werke, iii., 73 ; Encycl, 87. (The references to the larger Logic are to the pages of the second edition of the complete works, vols. iii.- v., 1843. The references to the Encyclopaedia are to the sections of the later editions ; the translation is that of Wallace. Exponents refer to the paragraphs of page or section.) 2 Cf. Werke, iv., 127 ; Encycl, 124.