restitution of the divided spiritual unity. The necessity which acts and negates in it, that is to say, is yet of one substance with both the agents. It is divided against itself in them; they are its conflicting forces; and in restoring its unity through negation it affirms them, so far as they are compatible with that unity. The qualification is essential, since the hero, for all his affinity with that power, is, as the living man we see before us, not so compatible. He must die, and his union with ‘eternal justice’ (which is more than ‘justice’) must itself be ‘eternal’ or ideal. But the qualification does not abolish what it qualifies. There is no occasion to ask how in particular, and in what various ways in various works, we feel the effect of this affirmative aspect in the catastrophe. But it corresponds at least with that strange double impression which is produced by the hero’s death. He dies, and our hearts die with him; and yet his death matters nothing to us, or we even exult. He is dead; and he has no more to do with death than the power which killed him and with which he is one.’[1]
Now logic in principle is even more than tragedy; for it is the express reconciliation of the subordinated elements, and the rational completion of lower principles in a whole into which they are carried without remainder. Logic is not encumbered by the actual living man, and the dialectic is not a history of personal sufferings which cannot be made good. Although at first dialectic changes are external and unintelligible to the mind which uses elementary principles, yet these changes themselves are seen by fuller knowledge to be a self-evolution of the complete truth. In its higher stages thought has to include the lower categories, and the elements of perfect knowledge are known by it as opposites.[2] But although tragedy and the dialectic differ in completeness, the power is the same; it is the whole. Thought is one system, and lives in every member. When a part in its finitude is taken as the whole, its truer nature breaks through in the form of contradiction, and cannot be satisfied until it renders explicit the fullness and truth against which the imperfect assertion sinned. The imperfect aspects can collide only because they have a proper relation and ought to be reconciled. The dialectic thus is a development of reason from
- ↑ Oxford Lectures on Poetry, p. 91.
- ↑ Cf. below, p. 40 ff.
