Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/346

332 MARY WHITON CALKINS : would be definitely unknowable. No one can completely enumerate every individual reality, and without such enumeration, no All can be conceived. But ultimate reality has already been shown to be knowable, to be within experience and not beyond it. Its completeness, therefore, must be of a sort which needs no impossible enumeration, and the ab- solute whole of like parts the Syllogism of Necessity, as Hegel calls it must be an Absolute Individual, not a system. This is the only reasoning by which Hegel opposes the theory that ultimate reality is a complete whole of co-ordinate like parts. He fails, as we have already indicated, to make use of a far subtler and more fundamental form of argument, 1 by which he might have established the truth that the Absolute One is an Individual. But however incomplete his argument, Hegel never falters in his affirmation of the doctrine. In book i., he defines ultimate reality as Being-for-Self, a One which is "just self-exclusion and explicit putting of itself as Many ". 2 Even more clearly, in book iii., he substitutes for the false conception of the complete whole of co-ordinate parts the conception of ultimate reality as Absolute Individual, "a totality of its particular members and ... a single particular or -exclusive individuality ". 3 THE ARGUMENTS, IN BOOKS II. AND III., AGAINST THE THEORY OF ULTIMATE REALITY AS A COMPOSITE or INTERDEPENDENT PARTS. We turn now to Hegel's discussion of ultimate reality as a composite of parts, whose interdependence is emphasised. The consideration of ultimate reality as composite of interdependent parts, though suggested in book i., is first definitely brought forward by the sections on Action and Reaction, Necessity and Freedom at the end of book ii. In this dis- cussion, Hegel no longer lays stress on the impossibility of conceiving a composite as complete. 4 Instead, he insists on the more fundamental doctrine that no mere composite, however complete, can be ultimate. To appreciate both the rigor and the defect of his argument, we must once again distinguish the two forms of composite reality : (1) the plurality of distinct and independent parts, and (2) the system of inter-related and mutually dependent parts. Hegel's argument directs itself against the first of these conceptions, the hypothesis of the bare and unrelated plurality of absolutely independent individuals. He has virtually already refuted this theory by showing that each term in the plurality is closely related to each of the others. 5 Now he points out, with specific applica- tion to the plurality, that causality is a universal relation ; that every limited reality is itself both cause and effect ; and that this interconnexion annihilates the independence of all, as well as of each, of the parts. 6 This unimpeachable argument, however, proves only what almost every pluralist would admit : the impossibility that ultimate reality is a mere aggregate of unrelated units. The argument does not, on the other hand, affect at all the deeper pluralist conception, of ultimate reality as the unity of all limited realities in a complete and closely articulated fact that some things of a certain kind possess a certain quality that the same quality is possessed by other things of the same kind. CJ. the similar teaching, under the heading 'Judgment of Reflection,' EneycL, 175 1 . 1 Gf. p. 328. *EncycL, 97 2 ; </. Werke, iii., 179', 187 2 . 3 Encycl., 191 ; italics mine. 4 For mere suggestion of this argument cf. Encycl., 156 2 . 5 Cf. B, I., a., p. 322 seq. 6 Encycl, 153'.