Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/373

HEGEL'S TREATMENT OF THE SUBJECTIVE NOTION. 357 anything by pure thought is in the dialectic. He there evolves only categories, which are themselves forms of pure thought. The great majority, on the other hand, of the Universals which appear in Laws of Nature have an empiri- cal element in them. And there is no evidence whatever that Hegel imagined that a new empirical idea could ever be produced by pure thought. Nor, even in the dialectic, does Hegel give us a Notion differentiating itself by pure thought. The lower (in the sense of the less adequate) passes into the higher, but the higher (in the sense of the more extensive) never divides itself up into the lower. The self-differentiation of the Notion, then, does not imply any inherent dialectic. It only means that it is an ultimate and inherent characteristic of the Notion that it is always united with one of several others. What these others are must be discovered by us through observation and experi- ment, and, when they are found, the conjunction must be accepted by us as an ultimate fact. We have reached now the conception of a regular system of laws proceeding from the more general to the less general, embracing at the top the whole of reality in a single unity, and at the bottom accounting for every quality in every indi- vidual. This conception did not develop till the Disjunctive Laws were reached. A Categorical Law connects one Uni- versal with another wider than itself, and leaves the rest of the extent of this wider universal undetermined. No Cate- gorical Law, therefore, can deal with the whole of the field to which it refers. But in a Disjunctive Law the whole of the field covered by the Subject-Universal is systematically divided and determined. And, since all Individuals must have some common quality, the widest Subject-Universal to be found in any Disjunctive Law must be one which includes all reality, and the network of laws will be co-extensive with the universe. Let us recapitulate briefly the more striking points in our advance. We started, in the Universal Notion as Such, with general qualities. We gained the idea of classification, for the first time, in the Particular Judgment, where, for the first time, we were concerned with the relation of two Universals. In the Categorical Judgment we made the all-important ad- vance to universal truths, and in the Categorical Laws we perceived that universal truths were not only true, but ulti- mate. Finally, in the Disjunctive Laws we find that these ultimate general truths form a systematic whole. In this process we see that the element of contingency