Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/75

HEGEL'S TREATMENT OF THE OBJECTIVE NOTION. 61 to be united, and they can never be united, since it would require the completion of the infinite process. The category which involves such contradictions must, of course, be transcended. And we have already seen how this may be done. The whole of the difficulty arose from the fact that End and Means were taken as separate realities. It was this that forced us to insert, between Means and End, an infinite series of new Means. And it was this which gave us the choice of either inserting another infinite series of Means between Means and Realised End, or else of pro- longing the series of Means forward in the vain attempt to reach a Kealised End which was different from a Means. We can get rid of the contradictions only by dropping our supposition that End and Means are in any way separate realities. We have known all along that they would only exist if they were connected. But now we are driven to the conclusion that they cannot exist if there is anything in either of them except its connexion with the other. The whole nature of the End is just to unify those Means, the whole nature of the Means is just to manifest that End. With this we pass to the final division of Teleology, to which Hegel gives the name of EEALISED END. The appropriateness of this name lies in the fact that the Realised End is the unity of the End and Means, and that we have now come to the conclusion that End and Means are not two realities connected with one another, but two aspects distinguishable within a single reality. The unity of the two sides is not built up, as previously, from their differ- ence, but the difference is an analysis of the unity. And thus this category takes its name from the unity of the two sides that is to say, from the Realised End. We have thus arrived at the close of the Objective Notion.. We have overcome the unbalanced abstractions of Mechan- ism and Chemism, and, instead of a mere plurality or mere unity, have found the basis of all reality in a reality of which plurality and unity are correlative and complementary as- pects each without any claim to an existence apart from its union with the other. The Objective Notion ends with the conception of a self- differentiating unity, as the Subjective Notion had ended before it. But the conception is now a far deeper one. The self-differentiating unity of the Disjunctive Laws of Nature only reached the proposition that every A must be either B,. C or D. But it was still possible that they were all B, and