Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/193

HEGEL'S TREATMENT OF THE CATEGORIES OF THE IDEA. 179 But, on the other hand, when we are dealing, not with pure thought, but with concrete reality, it is to the Philosophy of Spirit rather than the Logic that we must turn for a decision. Now in the Philosophy of Spirit Hegel gives Philo- sophy as the supreme stage of Spirit. He may have been inconsistent in doing this, but that he did it is beyond question. And it seems impossible to take Philosophy as anything but a species of knowledge. 1 Having reached the end of the dialectic let us consider what it has taught us about the relations of unity and plurality. From some points of view this may be considered the fundamental question in the dialectic, and it is the one round which a large number of misconceptions of Hegel's meaning have gathered. The relation of unity to plurality is a phrase which may mean several things. It may mean the relation of the fact of the unity to (a) the fact that there is a plurality, (b) the fact that the plurality consists of the precise number of individuals of which it does consist, (c) the fact that those individuals have the precise nature which they do have. As to the first of these questions, we have already given the answer. The unity is not the ground of the plurality. Nor can the plurality be explained from the unity. The relation that does exist between them is that, given the unity, we can infer the existence of the plurality, and, given the plurality, we can infer the existence of the unity. We can do this just because neither of them is logically prior to the other, and neither of them is an ultimate reality on which the other can be based. It is because each of them is a mere moment, and, therefore, taken in abstraction from the others is contradictory and impossible, that we are entitled to conclude from the existence of the one to the existence of the other. And there is no more serious, or more common, mistake in interpreting Hegel, than to sup- pose that the moment of plurality can be reached from the moment of unity in any way in which the moment of unity cannot be reached from the moment of plurality. As to the second question the relation between the unity and the precise number of individuals it resolves itself into the third. For if the precise nature of the in- dividuals is determined, their precise number is determined by that. This becomes clear as soon as we pass beyond the category of Quantity one of the earliest and most 1 1 have discussed this point at greater length in Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, chap. vi.