Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/71

HEGEL'S TREATMENT OF THE OBJECTIVE NOTION. 57 not exist except in conjunction with the other. This view dominates the first two subdivisions of Teleology, the first of which, called by Hegel the Subjective End, regards the Means as possessing no definite quality of their own except that they are a plurality. One Object is as good as another in any place, or for the manifestation of any particular part of the End. If in an Object A there is manifested the End in the shape of x, that does not mean that there is any special fitness in A to manifest x. B, or any other Object, would have done quite as well. All that the Objects are wanted for, is to provide a plurality. All the content is in the End alone. This is naturally the first form the category would take. For the immediate cause of the breaking down of the cate- gory of Chemism was that it was impossible to get the plurality out of unity. So that it was natural at first to look elsewhere only for the mere element of plurality, and to think that that once given, the unity could supply all the rest. The contradiction involved in this category is not hard to discover. For, while it asserts the Means to have separate natures, apart from that End which they carry out, it defines the Means so as to reduce this separate nature, and conse- quently the Means themselves to nothing. The interconnexions of the various Means with one another form the End, which the Means carry out. The End is the unity of the Means, and it is clearly to the End that these interconnexions, which unite the Means to one an- other, must be referred. Now the present category asserts that one Means would always do as well as another in carry- ing out the End, consequently, that the intrinsic nature of the Means has no relation to the End. It follows that the intrinsic nature of the Means has no relation to the con- nexion between the different Means. These connexions, however, form the whole of the external nature of the Objects which are considered as Means, and we saw, when we were dealing with Absolute Mechanism, that the inner nature only expresses itself through the outer. Therefore this intrinsic nature which the Means are asserted to possess can neither be their outer nor their inner nature and what else is there left for it to be ? Clearly nothing. To suggest that anything has a core of its own apart from and unaffected by its relations to other things would be to go back to the earlier categories of Essence, whose insufficiency has been demonstrated much earlier in the dialectic. The one quality, indeed, which the Means might seem to