knowing mind. We are not dealing with two quite differently organized things, a mind and a world; we are dealing with the fundamental principles of the intelligible content of rational thought; and the coherence of both aspects depends on the coherence of the principles themselves.
The second point is the order of the philosophic exposition of these principles. Hegel’s view of this is somewhat complex, and is to be fully understood only when the complete exposition is mastered. The peculiar method he adopts is called by him the dialectic, and I shall have to recur to it at various stages of the discussion. The point to be indicated here is an obvious and somewhat superficial one. Hegel sets out from the barest and emptiest of the principles of possible thought; he begins at the bottom and works upwards. The main alternatives seem to be either that of beginning anywhere and working at random, or that of beginning at the top and working downwards. The first of these alternatives is plainly inadequate. It is not a method, but the failure of one; and it cannot exhibit the categories in their rational inter-connexion. Lotze seems to think that it is the only possible attitude for a modest mind; but if this be so, then it seems clear that the mind in question has not pushed its investigation of experience far enough to reach the level of philosophy. It is still preoccupied with the order of learning, and has not attained to the order of explanation. Such a process is preliminary to philosophy, and Hegel himself went through it[1]; but he did not put his results forward as logic until he had emancipated himself from the adolescence it implies. The other method is that expressly enunciated by Spinoza, and Hegel rejects it. Spinoza begins with the whole, with substance, the final reality. But the difficulty immediately arises: If we start with the perfect principle why do we go further? Spinoza makes progress because what he calls the whole is not really such, but has beyond it another world of ‘modes’—in general, Natura naturata.[2] Hegel calls this method that of emanation. ‘It is a series of
- ↑ For the history of the development of Hegel’s logical theory v. Baillie, Hegel’s Logic.
- ↑ In his Larger Logic Hegel points out the greater concreteness of the mode when contrasted with the absolute or substance: WW. IV. pp. 184-99.
