Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/50

36 J. ELLIS MCTAGGART : only to the subject matter of Mechanics and Chemistry. Like all categories each of them is a predicate more or less accurate of all reality. Still less is it the case that an attempt is made by pure thought to deduce all the special characteristics of Mechanics and Chemistry as empirical sciences. What Hegel means by the names is that the most striking instances of the uses of the categories which he has called Mechanism and Chemism are to be found in the sciences of Mechanics and Chemistry. (We shall, I think, find reason to doubt this view about Chemism.) The use of the category is not confined to the science after which it is named, nor has the category anything to do with the empirical details of that science, but it is the form of pure thought which the science most naturally and usually employs. Why is the part of the logic which we are considering called the Objective Notion? It is clearly meant as an antithesis to the title of Subjective Notion given to the previous division. Now we saw reason in our last paper to reject the view that Subjective here meant the inner as opposed to the outer. It must rather mean the particular, contingent, and capricious, as opposed to the universal, necessary, and reasonable. And we saw there that the Sub- jective Notion began by dealing with systems of classification which were contingent and capricious, and finally ended in a system of classification which was universal and necessary. This result is inherited by the next division of the Logic. All the systematisations made in the different stages of the Objective Notion claim to be, not classifications we may adopt, like those in the earlier stages of the Subjective Notion, but, on the contrary, classifications which express the whole nature of the reality, and which therefore we must adopt. It is on this account that it is entitled to the name of Objective. In considering the transition from the Subjective to the Objective Notion, I should wish to refer to my paper on the Subjective Notion (MiND, 1897, p. 171). The conclusion there arrived at was that " things are doubly connected by similarity and by causation. And it is obvious that a thing may be, and generally is, connected by the one tie to things very different from those to which it is connected by the other." I submitted that the dialectic " first takes up the relation of similarity, and works it out through the course of the Subjective Notion. Then, in the Objective Notion, it proceeds to work out the relation of determination not going back arbitrarily to pick it up, but led on to it again by dialectical necessity, since the Subjective Notion, when fully