Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/62

48 J. ELLIS MCTAGGAKT : this is because there is, in a self-conscious being, a principle of unity higher than anything which we have attained in the Object. In dealing with simple Objects we must, I think, admit Hegel's argument that the relation is no more the quality of one Object than of the other. The only subject of which the relation can be predicated will be the system which these two Objects form. The qualities will belong to this system, and it will be the true unity. But again, two Objects cannot form a closed system, since all Objects in the universe are in natural connexion. Our system of two Objects will have relations with others, and will be merged with them, in the same way that the original Objects were merged in it since the relations, which alone give individuality, are found to be common property, and so merge, instead of keeping distinct. The system in which all the Objects, and all their relations, are contained, becomes the reality the only true Object, of which all the relations contained in the system are adjectives. The indi- vidual Objects disappear, and we find ourselves in the cate- gory of CHEMISM. This is a very perplexing category, and I must confess that Hegel's treatment of it seems to me to require emenda- tion. There is in it, Hegel says, an oscillation between a Neutral Object on the one hand, and, on the other hand, two extremes, separate, but connected and in a state of tension. I do not think that it is possible to doubt that Hegel intended to give us here, not an alternation of categories, but a cate- gory of alternation. It is not, according to him, that we alternately look on reality as a neutral object and as a tension of extremes, but that we hold throughout the whole of Chemism a position which asserts that reality itself con- tinually passes from one of these forms to the other. The passage from Absolute Mechanism to Chemism this appears to be Hegel's meaning gives us the neutral object. But the neutral object is undifferentiated, " it has sunk back to immediacy ". It has therefore no true unity. So it splits up into the extremes. But the extremes, being " biassed and strained," that is, in connexion with one another, fall back into the neutral object, and the process goes on ad infinitum. To the validity of this line of argument I wish to suggest three objections, (a) In the first place, what right has Hegel to make a neutral object the result of the transition from