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HEGELIAN CATEGORIES IN THE HEGELIAN ARGUMENT. 323 appendage, but is itself an inherent part, an inevitable attri- bute of every supposedly limited reality. Evidently, no such limited reality can be ultimate or final, since by its most intimate and essential attribute its self-identity it implies the validity of other realities. The greater part of the Logic is occupied with the consideration, under every possible form, of the argument just outlined. It appears in each book of the Logic ; it involves categories of the most varying names ; it is discussed on different levels of philosophical thought ; yet it is always, in the last analysis, the same invincible argument which it is Hegel's great merit to have expounded and illustrated until it had become in- wrought with the common fibre of philosophical doctrine. The argument first appears in book i., following upon the conclusion that Pure Being an undetermined Absolute is impossible. In the section on Deter- mined Being, 1 it is pointed out that every single, isolated reality has a ' character ' of its own, and that this, its determination, is also a ' nega- tion ' of some other quality and thus a ' limit ' as, for instance, " White is white " implies " White is not-black ". So arise the categories of Reality and Negation, 2 followed by several pairs of perfectly equivalent catagories. 3 Under varying names, the supposedly single unrelated Some- what is shown to imply the existence of another, and to be what it is in reference to that Other : " Being if kept distinct and apart . . . would be only the vacant abstraction of Being. . . . Hence the other-ness is not something indifferent and outside it but a function proper to it." It may be added that both the reduction in the number and the change in the order of the categories of Determined Being, in the Logic of the Encyclop&dia, as compared with the larger Logic, clearly suggest Hegel's own conviction of the unimportance and the unessential character of some of these categories. The argument, just outlined, is repeated in more usual terminology, under the discussion in book ii. of the categories of Identity and Difference. The analysis of these categories follows, to be sure, upon the discussion of Essence, or Unknowable Reality, but the categories themselves apply very clearly only to the knowable world of determined realities, the world of Appearance, regarded as itself a world of reality, not of illusion. 4 There can, indeed, be little doubt that these categories, Identity and Difference, are precisely equivalent to the earlier categories, Reality and Negation. The reality of anything that which gives it its character is simply its identity with itself and its difference from every- thing else ; and, similarly, negation means other-ness or non-identity (difference, in a loose sense of the term). Hegel's illustrations of reality, negation, and parallel categories clearly substantiate this interpretation. For example, he names 5 the fact that " the ground is a meadow not a pond " the qualitative limit of the meadow. The demonstration that every reality demands, by its very self-identity, the existence of other realities is applicable to abstract qualities as well .as to concrete things: for example 'round,' to be round, must be ' not- Werke, iii., S. 106 seq. ; Encycl, 89 seq. Werke, iii., S. 109 seq. ; Encycl., 91. Werke, iii., S. 113 seq. ; Encycl, ib. Encycl., 24. Of. J. McT. E. McTaggart, MIND, N.S., vi., 1897, 173 2 . Encycl., 92 2 .