Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/18

4 BERNARD BOSANQUET : abstract identity, for this is only one side of the antithesis." l Here, I admit, we are in the region of Essence, where oppo- sitions are sharp and pointed. But this does not account for the whole of Hegel's feeling, which is fundamental with him. " Whereas people say Contradiction is not thinkable, the truth is that in pain which a living being feels it is actually a real existence." 2 He says the same of motion in space : " Formal Thinking prescribes to itself the rule, that Contradiction is not thinkable ; but in fact the thinking of Contradiction is the essential moment of the Notion "* These latter passages are from the discussion of Life and of the Absolute Idea. All this is nothing new ; but it is relevant to my purpose to call to our minds how uncompromising Hegel's position really is about what he calls Contradiction, and how little he enters into the current isolation of that feature in experience, while admitting and maintaining that it is essentially provocative of change. A suggestion can now be made in answer to the question, "What survives when a Contradiction is resolved?" The reply might be, " A successful expression of negativity ". Not that we are taking Hegel's views as authoritative ; but this is a consideration that occurs to us as accounting for the fact that he, on the one hand, with all logicians, sees in Contra- diction something that cannot be tolerated ; and on the other hand, evidently with his deepest insight and conviction, holds that there underlies it something which is the pulse of life and the movement of the world, not through the fact of unthinkableness, but through the structure of Keality. This something he often calls Negativity, and it would seem to express the whole aspect or tendency of anything real, which finds imperfect manifestation in what has been described above as Formal or Logical Contradiction. Negativity, then, it is submitted, is fundamental in all that is real. It is the same characteristic which Dr. McTaggart describes as the tendency of all finite categories to complete themselves (notice the limitation to finite categories), and the same which Green expresses as the nature of a Self which is Self- conscious or at once its Self and its other. And in defining an answer to the question immediately before us -What form or spirit of difference survives when a logical Contra- diction is resolved ? we may take our bearings from Dr. McTaggart's description of this attribute of Reality. For him, it is a tendency not to negation, but to self completion. . l Encyclop., 119, Zusatz 2. 2 Wiss. d. Logik, Theil ii., s. 249. 3 Ibid., 332.