Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/172

158 J. ELLIS MCTAGGAET : case it would have fallen back on the categories of Essence, which the dialectic has already shown to be untenable. Lotze, also, holds the view that the differentiations of the Absolute cannot be conceived except as conscious beings. His reason, indeed, for this conclusion is that only conscious beings could give the necessary combination of unity with change, 1 which would not appeal to Hegel. But he also points out 2 that we can attach no meaning to the existence of anything as apart from the existence of God unless we conceive that thing as a conscious being. Here, it seems to me, we have the idea that consciousness is the only differen- tiation which is able to resist the force of the unity of the Absolute. Lotze, however, destroys the Hegelian character of his position (and, incidentally, contradicts the fundamental doctrines of his own Metaphysic) by treating the individuality of the conscious beings as something which tends to separate them from God, instead of as the expression of their unity with him. In this way, I believe, the transition from the category of Life to that of Cognition must be regarded, if we are to consider it as valid. Is this the way in which Hegel himself considered it ? It seems that the fundamental idea in his treatment of the transition was the one I have been ex- pounding that the unity in Life is so strong that it will crush out the individuals, and destroy itself, unless each of the individuals finds the unity within itself. Unfortunately, in spite of his own warning to the contrary, he dragged into his treatment of the category of Life several considerations which unquestionably belonged to the life of biological science, but which had nothing to do with his category of pure thought. And this very greatly mutilates the course of his argument. His fundamental error here seems to me to be in taking the category to imply a plurality of living beings. We saw, when dealing with the Objective Notion, that, by the cate- gory of Teleology, all reality must be combined in a single teleological system. And as the category of Life is merely the immediate version of Teleology, it is equally clear that, by that category, all reality must be combined in a single unity. But in biology we have to deal with a multitude of living beings, each of which is an organic unity, but which together do not form an organic unity, but only an assembly which reciprocally and mechanically determine 1 Metaphysic, section 96. 2 Microcosmus, book 9, chap. iii. (trans, vol. ii., p. 644).