sides. In his Logic Hegel shows that this conception fails in its task by noting how the essential, or mediate, aspect is upon closer scrutiny deposed from its proud position of identity with the real nature of the totality, and becomes itself a surface show; it ceases to be the principle of union and becomes one term among others requiring relation and organization. We may take a shorter route here. The thing falls into two discordant aspects, unreconciled in thought. On the one hand the thing is its properties; if they are abstracted there is nothing left behind. On the other hand the thing is other than its properties, it is that which has them, their substrate or bearer. It is thus one and many. But it provides no reconciliation of these two aspects; it contains both, but they are simply conjoined. There is nothing in the positive aspect to explain the negative power of the thing, its capacity for distinguishing its own properties and refusing others. ‘Togetherness’, in fact, is the mere name of unity without the substance, an abstract identity resting on differences which are at the same time beyond and outside it. The thing is an effort to think the surface show and apprehend its deeper self, but the attempt is not fully successful. The whole sphere with which we are dealing, viz. that of the categories of essence, is infected with the flaw manifested here. In essence unity is taken along with difference, but the inner nexus of the two is not apparent. Before passing to our next category, the conception of substance, and determining the advance made by it on thinghood, we may note that when Kant endeavours to distinguish sharply between the subject of knowledge and the things of experience, he is, in effect, led to ascribe the characteristics of thinghood to the subject. The weakness of the conception of the thing is that it is an abstract unity, presupposing differences which it cannot supply. It involves its properties and yet is distinct from them. This is also the nature of the transcendental unity of apperception. The ‘I think’, according to Kant, gathers the manifold into a synthetic unity, and is conscious of its own identity only in the unity of its synthetic act. But at the same time Kant assures us that the pure ego is an analytic unity or pure self-identity, and that it does not include the concrete detail which it implies. That is to say, it belongs to the realm of
