Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/67

HEGEL'S TREATMENT OF THE OBJECTIVE NOTION. 53 one of these two ideas to be fundamental, and tries to account for the other from it, while Teleology recognises both of them to be equally fundamental. In doing this Hegel attacks one of the strongest prejudices of the " non-speculative " mind. There are few things of which common sense feels more sure than that the same reality cannot be both One and Many. There may be a little differentiation in the One, a little unity in the Many. But that anything should be fundamentally and necessarily as much One as Many, as much Many as One, seems to it to be impossible. Against this prejudice of the natural man the dialectic continually directs its forces, but at this point more explicitly than ever before. We have here even more dis- tinctly than at the end of the Subjective Notion the idea of a self-differentiating unity, by which is to be understood, as I have explained elsewhere, 1 not a blank unity which pro- duces differentiations out of its inner nothingness, but a unity which, not through some external accident, but from inner necessity, is only to be found in a multiplicity which is as fundamental as itself. The term self-differentiating unity is rather misleading. The active participle suggests a logical if not a temporal process, and so leads us to suppose that the unity is the agent which produces the difference, and is therefore prior to it. This might to some extent be remedied if we were to realise that it would be just as true to say a self-unifying differentiation as a self-differentiating unity, though the suggestion of action would still remain inappro- priate. This doctrine is interesting as being one which has, mainly through the influence of Hegel, penetrated from metaphysics to everyday life. Common sense is not quite so certain as it used to be, that the One cannot also be the Many. The idea of a self-differentiating unity, generally under the more picturesque name of an organic unity, has worked itself into a place among the furniture of the average mind, and is per- haps being used with rather reckless freedom. Still it must be regarded as one of the most valuable of the presents which metaphysics has made to an ungrateful world. Hegel departs considerably from the common usage in the meaning which he gives to Teleology, and still more with End and Means, which with him signify respectively the aspects of unity and plurality. What we generally mean by Teleology is what Hegel calls " finite and outward design," in which some independently existing object is used by some 1 MIND, 1897, p. 356.