Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/173

HEGEL'S TREATMENT OF THE CATEGORIES OF THE IDEA. 159 one another. Now it is this idea which Hegel illegitimately introduces into the category of Life. According to his statement that category regards reality as a plurality of details combined into a smaller plurality of organic unities, which unities again, as combined form a Gattung, or species. This admission of a plurality of living unities wrecks the whole transition. The line that Hegel takes is that the individual is inadequate to the species, that the species breaks through it, therefore, and destroys it, incarnating itself in a fresh individual whose inadequacy again destroys it, and that the contradiction produced by the infinite process thus begun must be remedied by Cognition. But why is the individual inadequate to the species, and why must it break down under the attempt to manifest it ? We have seen that an organic unity is so close and strong that it does break down and destroy its parts unless they gain that extra strength which can only be given them by the category of Cognition. But a species is not an organic unity. It is a collection of individuals, each of which is an organic unity of its parts, but, for itself, it is merely a collection of objects in reciprocal determination. There is no reason to assert that such a unity as this has any tendency to crush the individuality of its members. For such a unity does not demand that there shall be nothing in the individuals which is not a manifestation of the unity. On the contrary, each individual has many peculiarities which have nothing to do with the idea of the species, and it has therefore a separate element which is quite indepen- dent of the idea of the species, and could not be crushed by it. Indeed it is difficult to see what right the idea of a species could, have to be found any higher in the dialectic than the Subjective Notion. Again, Hegel, at any rate in the Smaller Logic, explains death as due to the inadequacy of the individual to manifest the species. Now, even if such an inadequacy had been proved, death could not be its manifestation. For nothing can die till it has lived, and we should thus be forced to the conclusion that the individual was for a time adequate to manifest the species, but that, after a time it ceased to be so. This would be useless for the purposes of the Logic. We cannot proceed from the idea of Life to that of Cogni- tion unless we can find the former to be contradictory. And if it is contradictory, it can never be true of anything, and so never cease to be true. It will always have the limited truth which an imperfect category has. It will