deteriorating stages’, he says, ‘which begin with the complete, with the absolute totality, with God. God has created; and from Him have come forth radiations, reflections, and likenesses, of which the first is most akin to Him. The first production also shows activity, but less completely, and so downwards . . . to the negative, matter, the extreme of evil. Thus the emanation ends with the lack of all form’.[1]
There is a sense in which we must begin with the whole. Until we become aware of the wholeness of being we are not on philosophic ground, and are unable to trace the interrelations of the principles of experience. The order of the dialectic process is guided by an ever present consciousness of the highest stages, and it is not until we reach the last of the three main divisions that we see clearly by what path we have come. At first it is not explicitly known to us that the principle we use is that of single reality: we begin with the poorest possible way of characterizing things and pass upwards to more concrete attitudes of thought. This order may be regarded in two ways; it is a process from abstract to concrete, and it is a movement from the external to the internal. The effort of thought at first is to take one thing at a time; the unities which thought imposes on things are very loose, and express but few of their relations. As thought rises in the scale its principles become more concrete, they gain wealth and depth. That is to say, they express the object more truly. They present more adequately its relations to its context and to the whole system of which it forms a part; and that is why Hegel uses the word, concrete, in this connexion.
The other way of characterizing the movement gives us a point of transition to the discussion of its motive power. The lower categories are abstract because they are external. Most of reality lies beyond their grasp; things are presented singly, and thought does not see how each determines the nature of the others and enters into their being. In Hegel’s view the Nemesis of such thought is that it turns into its opposite. Take the simplest example. The first category of the Logic is being. The simplest, barest, and least affirmation we can make is that indicated by the word ‘is’. But if we say no more than this, what have we said? We must strip off the idea of a ‘thing’; the assertion is not that such and
- ↑ WW. VII. p. 35.
