Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/64

50 J. ELLIS MCTAGGAET : I should venture to suggest a reconstruction of the cate- gory. The essential characteristic of it should be, I suggest, not the abolition of all differentiation, but, as appears in the transition from Absolute Mechanism, the reference of all the differentiation to a unity which is itself single and un- differentiated. The emphasis, you may say, is changed. In Absolute Mechanism we had, indeed, a unity of a sort, for we had a system. But the fundamental point was the plurality of objects, with their relations, and the unity was only derivative an effect of the plurality. And in Chemism, on this theory, we shall have a differentiation of relations, but all springing out of, referred to, and dependent on a unit}^ which is taken as devoid of plurality. In this form the category, as we have seen, follows quite naturally from Absolute Mechanism. The latter had at- tempted to explain reality by the interaction of a plurality of Objects. But the relations, belonging as they did to the Objects jointly, so far from distinguishing one Object from another, rather merged them together, and as the Objects had no distinguishing qualities except their relations, there was nothing to keep them apart. They ran together, and were fused in one single Object, occupying the whole extent previously occupied by the system of Objects, and of this Object all the relations became an attribute. This then would be the process by which we arrived at the new category. The inadequacy of such a point of view, and the necessity for transcending it, are obvious. It is quite impossible that a mere unity, without any plurality about it, should be able to account for a plurality. This would involve a spontaneous self-differentiation of the unity which Hegel, in agreement with common-sense, would hold to be impossible. If you put nothing but unity in, you can get nothing but unity out. The growth of the dialectic does not give an example of the contrary. In the first place the dialectic, though it develops, never differentiates itself (cp. MIND, 1897, p. 357). In the second place, as I have pointed out elsewhere (Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic), the real spring of the dialectic movement lies in the implicit concrete truth, which it proceeds to render explicit, and not in the already explicit abstraction from which it starts. Thus in the growth of the dialectic, as elsewhere, it remains true that something can never grow out of nothing. Now the category of Chemism involves an attempt to get some- thing out of nothing. The unified plurality of the relations is to be accounted for by the bare unity of the base. And this would leave the plurality unaccounted for and illegitimate.