antinomies, the conflict within experience has ultimately no other basis than the original dualism of mind and outward reality. The various minor collisions, e.g., between sense and understanding, understanding and reason, constitutive and regulative principles, practical reason and theoretic reason, and so forth, are all modifications of the primary uncritical supposition; and if it is withdrawn their substance has vanished. So long as they remain unchecked, the influence of the thing-in-itself persists. That is to say, Kant’s inquiry into the conditions of an intelligible world is conducted under the guidance of a firm dualism of subject and object, in accordance with which universality and form are attributed to the former, particularity and content to the latter. If experience manifests universality, he argues, it is mind-made and subjective. From this Hegel dissents.[1] For Kant, in so far as he is a dualist, the distinction between subjective and objective coincides with that between knowledge and what is beyond knowledge. And, although his main contribution to epistemology is a new sense of objectivity which falls within experience, yet there remains in the background the original conception of the objective as independent and trans-subjective. Such a distinction is, for Hegel, unmeaning. The unknowable is the most absurd of all conceptions, and the least interesting to rational beings; it is a direct contradiction in terms. The only significant distinction between subjective and objective falls within the field of knowledge; it marks off various contents from one another, and does not separate the knowable from the unknowable. When the trans-subjective thing-in-itself vanishes, the contrast between it and the phenomenal or subjective object loses all point; and hence the phenomenal objectivity which Kant had set up within experience developed for Hegel into real objectivity. With this change of attitude came a great change of content. The fundamental principles which make experience possible were, for Kant, few in number, and the principles of pure thought involved amounted only to twelve. Hegel pushed the analysis much further; he found logical principles continuous with the categories and principles of the understanding both above and below them; and thus in place of Kant’s limited list there arises the whole elaborate structure of Hegel’s logic.
- ↑ Cf. Encyclopaedia, § 41, Zusatz 2, WW. VI. pp. 87-9.
