theStech/trainer_dataset · Datasets at Fast360

source stringclasses 3 values	answer stringlengths 0 156k	extra dict
book	comport many ideally possible complements. But as the facts are not the complements, so the knowledge of the one is not the knowledge of the other in anything but the few necessary elements of which all must partake in order to be together at all. Why, if one act of knowledge could from one point take in the total perspective, with all mere possibilities abolished, should there ever have been anything more than that act? Why duplicate it by the tedious unrolling, inch by inch, of the foredone reality? No answer seems possible. On the other hand, if we stipulate only a partial community of partially independent powers, we see perfectly why no one part controls the whole view, but each detail must come and be actually given, before, in any special sense, it can be said to be determined at all. This is the mor al	null
book	view, the view that gives to other powers the same freedom it would have itself,—not the ridiculous ‘freedom to do right,’ which in my mouth can only mean the freedom to do as I think right, but the freedom to do as they think right, or wrong either. After all, what	null
book	accounts do the nether-most bounds of the universe owe to me? By what insatiate conceit and lust of intellectual despotism do I arrogate the right to know their secrets, and from my philosophic throne to play the only airs they shall march to, as if I were the Lord’s anointed? Is not my knowing them at all a gift and not a right? And shall it be given before they are given? Data! gifts! something to be thankful for! It is a gift that we can approach things at all,	null
book	and, by means of the time and space of which our minds and they partake, alter our actions so as to meet them.	null
book	There are ‘bounds of ord’ nance ’ set for all things, where they must pause or rue it. ‘ Facts ’ are	null
book	the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.	null
book	Now, to a mind like Hegel’s such pusillanimous twaddle sounds simply loathsome. Bounds	null
book	that we can ’t overpass! Data! facts that say, “ Hands off, till we are given ”! possibilities we	null
book	can’t control! a banquet of which we merely share! Heavens, this is intolerable; such a world	null
book	is no world for a philosopher to have to do with. He must have all or nothing. If the world cannot be rational in my sense, in the sense of unconditional surrender, I refuse to grant that it	null
book	is rational at all. It is pure incoherence, a chaos, a nulliverse, to whose haphazard sway I will not truckle. But, no! this is not the world. The world is philosophy’s own,—a single block, of which, if she once get her teeth on any part, the whole shall inevitably become her prey and feed her all -devouring theoretic maw. Naught shall be but the necessities she creates and	null
book	impossibilities; freedom shall mean freedom to obey her will, ideal and actual shall be one: she, and I as her champion, will be satisfied on no lower terms.	null
book	The insolence of sway, the hubris on which gods take vengeance, is in temporal and spiritual	null
book	matters usually admitted to be a vice. A Bonaparte and a Philip II. are called monsters. But	null
book	117	null
book	when an intellect is found insatiate enough to declare that all existence must bend the knee to	null
book	its requirements, we do not call its owner a monster, but a philosophic prophet. May not this	null
book	be all wrong? Is there any one of our functions exempted from the common lot of lia bility to	null
book	excess? And where everything else must be contented with its part in the universe, shall the theorizing faculty ride rough-shod over the whole?	null
book	I confess I can see no à priori reason for the exception. He who claims it must be judged by	null
book	the consequences of his acts, and by them alone. Let Hegel then confront the universe with	null
book	his claim, and see how he can make the two match.	null
book	The universe absolutely refuses to let him travel without jolt. Time, space, and his ego are continuous; so are degrees of heat, shades of light and color, and a few other serial things; so too do potatoes call for salt, and cranberries for sugar, in the taste of one who knows what salt and sugar are. But on the whole there is nought to soften the shock of surprise to his intelligence, as it passes from one quality of being to another. Light is not heat, heat is not light; and to him who holds the one the other is not given till it give itself. Real being comes moreover and goes from any concept at its own sweet will, with no permission asked of the conceiver. In despair must Hegel lift vain hands of imprecation; and since he will take nothing but the whole, he must throw away even the part he might retain, and call the nature of things an absolute muddle and incoherence.	null
book	But, hark! What wondrous strain is this that steals upon his ear? Incoherence itself, may it not be the very sort of coherence I require? Muddle! is it anything but a peculiar sort of transparency? Is not jolt passage? Is friction other than a kind of lubr ication? Is not a chasm a	null
book	filling? —a queer kind of filling, but a filling still. Why seek for a glue to hold things together	null
book	when their very falling apart is the only glue you need? Let all that negation which seemed to disintegrate the universe be the mortar that combines it, and the problem stands solved. The paradoxical character of the notion could not fail to please a mind monstrous even in its native Germany, where mental excess is endemic. Richard, for a moment brought to bay, is himself again. He vaults into the saddle, and from that time his career is that of a philosophic desperado,—one series of outrages upon the chastity of thought.	null
book	And can we not ourselves sympathize with his mood in some degree? The old receipts of	null
book	squeezing the thistle and taking the bull by the horns have many applications. An evil frankly accepted loses half its sting and all its terror. The Stoics had their chea p and easy way of	null
book	dealing with evil. Call your woes goods, they said; refuse to call your lost blessings by that	null
book	name, —and you are happy. So of the unintelligibilities: call them means of intelligibility, and	null
book	what further do you require? There is even a more legitimate excuse than that. In the exceedingness of the facts of life over our f ormulas lies a standing temptation at certain times	null
book	to give up trying to say anything adequate about them, and to take refuge in wild and whirling words which but confess our impotence before their ineffability. Thus Baron Bunsen writes to his wife: “Nothing is near but the far; nothing true but the highest; nothing credible but the inconceivable; nothing so real as the impossible; nothing clear but the deepest; nothing so visible as the invisible; and no life is there but through death.” Of these ecstatic moments the credo quia impossibile is the classical expression. Hegel ’s originality lies in his making	null
book	their mood permanent and sacramental, and authorized to supersede all others,—not as a mystical bath and refuge for feeling when tired reason sickens of her intellectual responsibilities (thank Heaven! that bath is always r eady), but as the very form of intellectual	null
book	responsibility itself.	null
book	And now after this long introduction, let me trace some of Hegel’s ways of applying his discovery. His system resembles a mouse-trap, in which if you once pass the door you may be lost forever. Safety lies in not entering. Hegelians have anointed, so to speak, the entrance	null
book	118	null
book	with various considerations which, stated in an abstract form, are so plausible as to slide us	null
book	unresistingly and almost unwittingly through the fatal arch. It is not necessary to drink the ocean to know that it is salt; nor need a critic dissect a whole system after proving that its premises are rotten. I shall accordingly confine myself to a few of the points that captivate beginners most; and assume that if they break down, so must the system which they prop.	null
book	First of all, Hegel has to do utterly away with the sharing and partaking business he so much	null
book	loathes. He will not call contradiction the glue in one place and identity in another; that is too half-hearted. Contradiction must be a glue universal, and must derive its credit from being	null
book	shown to be latently involved in cases that we hitherto supposed to embody pure continuity. Thus, the relations of an ego with its objects, of one time with another time, of one place with another place, of a cause with its eff ect, of a thing with its properties, and especially of parts	null
book	with wholes, must be shown to involve contradiction. Contradiction, shown to lurk in the very heart of coherence and continuity, cannot after that be held to defeat them, and must be taken as the universal solvent,—or, rather, there is no longer any need of a solvent. To ‘dissolve’ things in identity was the dream of earlier cruder schools. Hegel will show that their very difference is their identity, and that in the act of detachment the detachment is undone, and they fall into each other’ s arms.	null
book	Now, at the very outset it seems rather odd that a philosopher who pretends that the world is absolutely rational, or in other words that it can be completely understood, should fall back on a principle (the identity of contradictories) which utterly defies understanding, and obliges him in fact to use the word ‘understanding,’ whenever it occurs in his pages, as a term of contempt. Take the case of space we used above. The common man who looks at space believes there is nothing in it to be acquainted with beyond what he sees; no hidden machinery, no secrets, nothing but the parts as they lie side by side and make the static whole. His intellect is satisfied with accepting space as an ultimate genus of the given. But Hegel cries to him: “Dupe! dost thou not see it to be one nest of incompatibilities? Do not the unity of its wholeness and the diversity of its parts stand in patent contradiction? Does it not both unite and divide things; and but for this strange and irreconcilable activity, would it be at all?	null
book	The hidden dynamism of self- contradiction is what incessantly produces the static appearance	null
book	by which your sense is fooled.”	null
book	But if the man ask how self-contradiction can do all this, and how its dynamism may be seen	null
book	to work, Hegel can only reply by showing him the space itself and saying: “ Lo, thus .” In	null
book	other words, instead of the principle of explanation being more intelligible than the thing to	null
book	be explained, it is absolutely unintelligible if taken by itself, and must appeal to its pretended product to prove its existence. Surely, such a system of explaining notum per ignotum ,	null
book	of making the explicans borrow credentials from the explicand , and of creating paradoxes and	null
book	impossibilities where none were suspected, is a strange candidate for the honor of being a complete rationalizer of the world.	null
book	The principle of the contradictoriness of identity and the identity of contradictories is the	null
book	essence of the hegelian system. But what probably washes this principle down most with beginners is the combination in which its author works it with another principle which is by no means characteristic of his system, and which, for want of a better name, might be called the ‘principle of totality. ’ This principle says that you cannot adequately know even a part	null
book	until you know of what whole it forms a part. As Aristotle writes and Hegel loves to quote, an amputated hand is not even a hand. And as Tennyson says,—	null
book	“Little flower —but if I could understand	null
book	What you are, root and all, and all in all,	null
book	I should know what God and man is.”	null
book	119	null
book	Obviously, until we have taken in all the relations, immediate or remote, into which the thing	null
book	actually enters or potentially may enter, we do not know all about the thing.	null
book	And obviously for such an exhaustive acquaintance with the thing, an acquaintance with every other thing, actual and potential, near and remote, is needed; so that it is quite fair to say that omniscience alone can completely know any one thing as it stands. Standing in a world of relations, that world must be known before the thing is fully known. This doctrine is of course an integral part of empiricism, an integral part of common-sense. Since when could good men not apprehend the passing hour in the light of life ’s larger sweep, —not grow	null
book	dispassionate the more they stretched their view? Did the ‘ law of sharing ’ so little legitimate	null
book	their procedure that a law of identity of contradictories, forsooth, must be trumped up to give it scope? Out upon the idea!	null
book	Hume ’s account of causation is a good illustration of the way in which empiricism may use	null
book	the principle of totality. We call something a cause; but we at the same time deny its effect to	null
book	be in any latent way contained in or substantially identical with it. We thus cannot tell what its causality amounts to until its effect has actually supervened. The effect, then, or something beyond the thing is what makes the thing to be so far as it is a cause. Humism thus says that its causality is something adventitious and not necessarily given when its other attributes are	null
book	there. Generalizing this, empiricism contends that we must everywhere distinguish between the intrinsic being of a thing and its relations, and, among these, between those that are essential to our knowing it at all and those that may be called adventitious. The thing as actually present in a given world is there with all its relations; for it to be known as	null
book	it there exists, they must be known too, and it and they form a single fact for any consciousness large enough to embrace that world as a unity. But what constitutes this singleness of fact, this unity? Empiricism says, Nothing but the relation- yielding matrix in	null
book	which the several items of the world find themselves embedded,—time, namely, and space, and the mind of the knower. And it says that were some of the items quite different from what they are and others the same, still, for aught we can see, an equally unitary world might be, provided each item were an object for consciousness and occupied a determinate point in space and time. All the adventitious relations would in such a world be changed, along with the intrinsic natures and places of the beings between which they obtained; but the ‘principle of totality ’ in knowledge would in no wise be affected.	null
book	But Hegelism dogmatically denies all this to be possible. In the first place it says there are no intrinsic natures that may change; in the second it says there are no adventitious relations. When the relations of what we call a thing are told, no caput mortuum of intrinsicality, no	null
book	‘nature, ’ is left. The relations soak up all there is of the thing; the ‘ items ’ of the world are	null
book	but foci of relation with other foci of relation; and all the relations are necessary. The unity of	null
book	the world has nothing to do with any ‘ matrix. ’ The matrix and the items, each with all, make	null
book	a unity, simply because each in truth is all the rest. The proof lies in the hegelian principle of	null
book	totality, which demands that if any one part be posited alone all the others shall forthwith emanate from it and infallibly reproduce the whole. In the modus operandi of the	null
book	emanation comes in, as I said, that partnership of the principle of totality with that of the identity of contradictories which so recommends the latter to beginners in Hegel’ s	null
book	philosophy. To posit one item alone is to deny the rest; to deny them is to refer to them; to refer to them is to begin, at least, to bring them on the scene; and to begin is in the fulness of time to end.	null
book	If we call this a monism, Hegel is quick to cry, Not so! To say simply that the one item is the rest of the universe is as false and one- sided as to say that it is simply itself. It is both and	null
book	neither; and the only condition on which we gain the right to affirm that it is, is that we fail	null
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book	not to keep affirming all the while that it is not, as well. Thus the truth refuses to be expressed	null
book	in any single act of judgment or sentence. The world appears as a monism and a pluralism, just as it appeared in our own introductory exposition.	null
book	But the trouble that keeps us and Hegel from ever joining hands over this apparent formula of	null
book	brotherhood is that we distinguish, or try to distinguish, the respects in which the world is one from those in which it is many, while all such stable distinctio ns are what he most	null
book	abominates. The reader may decide which procedure helps his reason most. For my own part, the time -honored formula of empiricist pluralism, that the world cannot be set down in any	null
book	single proposition, grows less instead of more intelligible when I add, “And yet the different propositions that express it are one!” The unity of the propositions is that of the mind that harbors them. Any one who insists that their diversity is in any way itself their unity, can only do so because he loves obscurity and mystification for their own pure sakes.	null
book	Where you meet with a contradiction among realities, Herbart used to say, it shows you have	null
book	failed to make a real distinction. Hegel ’s sovereign method of going to work and saving all	null
book	possible contradictions, lies in pertinaciously refusing to distinguish. He takes what is true of a term secundum quid, treats it as true of the same term simpliciter , and then, of course,	null
book	applies it to the term secundum aliud. A good example of this is found in the first triad. This triad shows that the mutability of the real world is due to the fact that being constantly negates itself; that whatever is by the same act is not , and gets undone and swept away; and	null
book	that thus the irremediable torrent of life about which so much rhetoric has been written has its roots in an ineluctable necessity which lies revealed to our logical reason. This notion of a being which forever stumbles over its own feet, and has to change in order to exist at all, is a very picturesque symbol of the reality, and is probably one of the points that make young readers feel as if a deep core of truth lay in the system.	null
book	But how is the reasoning done? Pure being is assumed, without determinations, being secundum quid. In this respect it agrees with nothing. Therefore simpliciter it is	null
book	nothing; wherever we find it, it is nothing; crowned with complete determinations then, or secundum aliud, it is nothing still, and hebt sich auf .	null
book	It is as if we said, Man without his clothes may be named ‘ the naked. ’ Therefore	null
book	man simpliciter is the naked; and finally man with his hat, shoes, and overcoat on is the	null
book	naked still.	null
book	Of course we may in this instance or any other repeat that the conclusion is strictly true, however comical it seems. Man within the clothes is naked, just as he is without them. Man would never have invented the clothes had he not been naked. The fact of his being clad at all does prove his essential nudity. And so in general,—the form of any judgment, being the addition of a predicate to a subject, shows that the subject has been conceived without the predicate, and thus by a strained metaphor may be called the predicate ’s negation. Well and	null
book	good! let the expression pass. But we must notice this. The judgment has now created a new subject, the naked-clad, and all propositions regarding this must be judged on their own merits; for those true of the old subject, ‘the naked,’ are no longer true of this one. For instance, we cannot say because the naked pure and simple must not enter the drawing -room	null
book	or is in danger of taking cold, that the naked with his clothes on will also take cold or must stay in his bedroom. Hold to it et ernally that the clad man is still naked if it amuse you, —’tis	null
book	designated in the bond; but the so-called contradiction is a sterile boon. Like Shylock’s pound of flesh, it leads to no consequences. It does not entitle you to one drop of his Christian blood either in the way of catarrh, social exclusion, or what further results pure nakedness may involve.	null

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comport many ideally possible complements. But as the facts are not the complements, so the knowledge of the one is not the knowledge of the other in anything but the few necessary elements of which all must partake in order to be together at all. Why, if one act of knowledge could from one point take in the total perspective, with all mere possibilities abolished, should there ever have been anything more than that act? Why duplicate it by the tedious unrolling, inch by inch, of the foredone reality? No answer seems possible. On the other hand, if we stipulate only a partial community of partially independent powers, we see perfectly why no one part controls the whole view, but each detail must come and be actually given, before, in any special sense, it can be said to be determined at all. This is the mor al

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view, the view that gives to other powers the same freedom it would have itself,—not the ridiculous ‘freedom to do right,’ which in my mouth can only mean the freedom to do as I think right, but the freedom to do as they think right, or wrong either. After all, what

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accounts do the nether-most bounds of the universe owe to me? By what insatiate conceit and lust of intellectual despotism do I arrogate the right to know their secrets, and from my philosophic throne to play the only airs they shall march to, as if I were the Lord’s anointed? Is not my knowing them at all a gift and not a right? And shall it be given before they are given? Data! gifts! something to be thankful for! It is a gift that we can approach things at all,

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and, by means of the time and space of which our minds and they partake, alter our actions so as to meet them.

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There are ‘bounds of ord’ nance ’ set for all things, where they must pause or rue it. ‘ Facts ’ are

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the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.

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Now, to a mind like Hegel’s such pusillanimous twaddle sounds simply loathsome. Bounds

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that we can ’t overpass! Data! facts that say, “ Hands off, till we are given ”! possibilities we

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can’t control! a banquet of which we merely share! Heavens, this is intolerable; such a world

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is no world for a philosopher to have to do with. He must have all or nothing. If the world cannot be rational in my sense, in the sense of unconditional surrender, I refuse to grant that it

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is rational at all. It is pure incoherence, a chaos, a nulliverse, to whose haphazard sway I will not truckle. But, no! this is not the world. The world is philosophy’s own,—a single block, of which, if she once get her teeth on any part, the whole shall inevitably become her prey and feed her all -devouring theoretic maw. Naught shall be but the necessities she creates and

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impossibilities; freedom shall mean freedom to obey her will, ideal and actual shall be one: she, and I as her champion, will be satisfied on no lower terms.

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The insolence of sway, the hubris on which gods take vengeance, is in temporal and spiritual

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matters usually admitted to be a vice. A Bonaparte and a Philip II. are called monsters. But

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117

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when an intellect is found insatiate enough to declare that all existence must bend the knee to

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its requirements, we do not call its owner a monster, but a philosophic prophet. May not this

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be all wrong? Is there any one of our functions exempted from the common lot of lia bility to

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excess? And where everything else must be contented with its part in the universe, shall the theorizing faculty ride rough-shod over the whole?

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I confess I can see no à priori reason for the exception. He who claims it must be judged by

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the consequences of his acts, and by them alone. Let Hegel then confront the universe with

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his claim, and see how he can make the two match.

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The universe absolutely refuses to let him travel without jolt. Time, space, and his ego are continuous; so are degrees of heat, shades of light and color, and a few other serial things; so too do potatoes call for salt, and cranberries for sugar, in the taste of one who knows what salt and sugar are. But on the whole there is nought to soften the shock of surprise to his intelligence, as it passes from one quality of being to another. Light is not heat, heat is not light; and to him who holds the one the other is not given till it give itself. Real being comes moreover and goes from any concept at its own sweet will, with no permission asked of the conceiver. In despair must Hegel lift vain hands of imprecation; and since he will take nothing but the whole, he must throw away even the part he might retain, and call the nature of things an absolute muddle and incoherence.

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But, hark! What wondrous strain is this that steals upon his ear? Incoherence itself, may it not be the very sort of coherence I require? Muddle! is it anything but a peculiar sort of transparency? Is not jolt passage? Is friction other than a kind of lubr ication? Is not a chasm a

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filling? —a queer kind of filling, but a filling still. Why seek for a glue to hold things together

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when their very falling apart is the only glue you need? Let all that negation which seemed to disintegrate the universe be the mortar that combines it, and the problem stands solved. The paradoxical character of the notion could not fail to please a mind monstrous even in its native Germany, where mental excess is endemic. Richard, for a moment brought to bay, is himself again. He vaults into the saddle, and from that time his career is that of a philosophic desperado,—one series of outrages upon the chastity of thought.

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And can we not ourselves sympathize with his mood in some degree? The old receipts of

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squeezing the thistle and taking the bull by the horns have many applications. An evil frankly accepted loses half its sting and all its terror. The Stoics had their chea p and easy way of

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dealing with evil. Call your woes goods, they said; refuse to call your lost blessings by that

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name, —and you are happy. So of the unintelligibilities: call them means of intelligibility, and

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what further do you require? There is even a more legitimate excuse than that. In the exceedingness of the facts of life over our f ormulas lies a standing temptation at certain times

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to give up trying to say anything adequate about them, and to take refuge in wild and whirling words which but confess our impotence before their ineffability. Thus Baron Bunsen writes to his wife: “Nothing is near but the far; nothing true but the highest; nothing credible but the inconceivable; nothing so real as the impossible; nothing clear but the deepest; nothing so visible as the invisible; and no life is there but through death.” Of these ecstatic moments the credo quia impossibile is the classical expression. Hegel ’s originality lies in his making

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their mood permanent and sacramental, and authorized to supersede all others,—not as a mystical bath and refuge for feeling when tired reason sickens of her intellectual responsibilities (thank Heaven! that bath is always r eady), but as the very form of intellectual

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responsibility itself.

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And now after this long introduction, let me trace some of Hegel’s ways of applying his discovery. His system resembles a mouse-trap, in which if you once pass the door you may be lost forever. Safety lies in not entering. Hegelians have anointed, so to speak, the entrance

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118

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with various considerations which, stated in an abstract form, are so plausible as to slide us

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unresistingly and almost unwittingly through the fatal arch. It is not necessary to drink the ocean to know that it is salt; nor need a critic dissect a whole system after proving that its premises are rotten. I shall accordingly confine myself to a few of the points that captivate beginners most; and assume that if they break down, so must the system which they prop.

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First of all, Hegel has to do utterly away with the sharing and partaking business he so much

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loathes. He will not call contradiction the glue in one place and identity in another; that is too half-hearted. Contradiction must be a glue universal, and must derive its credit from being

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shown to be latently involved in cases that we hitherto supposed to embody pure continuity. Thus, the relations of an ego with its objects, of one time with another time, of one place with another place, of a cause with its eff ect, of a thing with its properties, and especially of parts

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with wholes, must be shown to involve contradiction. Contradiction, shown to lurk in the very heart of coherence and continuity, cannot after that be held to defeat them, and must be taken as the universal solvent,—or, rather, there is no longer any need of a solvent. To ‘dissolve’ things in identity was the dream of earlier cruder schools. Hegel will show that their very difference is their identity, and that in the act of detachment the detachment is undone, and they fall into each other’ s arms.

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Now, at the very outset it seems rather odd that a philosopher who pretends that the world is absolutely rational, or in other words that it can be completely understood, should fall back on a principle (the identity of contradictories) which utterly defies understanding, and obliges him in fact to use the word ‘understanding,’ whenever it occurs in his pages, as a term of contempt. Take the case of space we used above. The common man who looks at space believes there is nothing in it to be acquainted with beyond what he sees; no hidden machinery, no secrets, nothing but the parts as they lie side by side and make the static whole. His intellect is satisfied with accepting space as an ultimate genus of the given. But Hegel cries to him: “Dupe! dost thou not see it to be one nest of incompatibilities? Do not the unity of its wholeness and the diversity of its parts stand in patent contradiction? Does it not both unite and divide things; and but for this strange and irreconcilable activity, would it be at all?

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The hidden dynamism of self- contradiction is what incessantly produces the static appearance

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by which your sense is fooled.”

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But if the man ask how self-contradiction can do all this, and how its dynamism may be seen

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to work, Hegel can only reply by showing him the space itself and saying: “ Lo, thus .” In

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other words, instead of the principle of explanation being more intelligible than the thing to

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be explained, it is absolutely unintelligible if taken by itself, and must appeal to its pretended product to prove its existence. Surely, such a system of explaining notum per ignotum ,

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of making the explicans borrow credentials from the explicand , and of creating paradoxes and

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impossibilities where none were suspected, is a strange candidate for the honor of being a complete rationalizer of the world.

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The principle of the contradictoriness of identity and the identity of contradictories is the

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essence of the hegelian system. But what probably washes this principle down most with beginners is the combination in which its author works it with another principle which is by no means characteristic of his system, and which, for want of a better name, might be called the ‘principle of totality. ’ This principle says that you cannot adequately know even a part

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until you know of what whole it forms a part. As Aristotle writes and Hegel loves to quote, an amputated hand is not even a hand. And as Tennyson says,—

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“Little flower —but if I could understand

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What you are, root and all, and all in all,

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I should know what God and man is.”

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119

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Obviously, until we have taken in all the relations, immediate or remote, into which the thing

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actually enters or potentially may enter, we do not know all about the thing.

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And obviously for such an exhaustive acquaintance with the thing, an acquaintance with every other thing, actual and potential, near and remote, is needed; so that it is quite fair to say that omniscience alone can completely know any one thing as it stands. Standing in a world of relations, that world must be known before the thing is fully known. This doctrine is of course an integral part of empiricism, an integral part of common-sense. Since when could good men not apprehend the passing hour in the light of life ’s larger sweep, —not grow

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dispassionate the more they stretched their view? Did the ‘ law of sharing ’ so little legitimate

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their procedure that a law of identity of contradictories, forsooth, must be trumped up to give it scope? Out upon the idea!

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Hume ’s account of causation is a good illustration of the way in which empiricism may use

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the principle of totality. We call something a cause; but we at the same time deny its effect to

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be in any latent way contained in or substantially identical with it. We thus cannot tell what its causality amounts to until its effect has actually supervened. The effect, then, or something beyond the thing is what makes the thing to be so far as it is a cause. Humism thus says that its causality is something adventitious and not necessarily given when its other attributes are

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there. Generalizing this, empiricism contends that we must everywhere distinguish between the intrinsic being of a thing and its relations, and, among these, between those that are essential to our knowing it at all and those that may be called adventitious. The thing as actually present in a given world is there with all its relations; for it to be known as

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it there exists, they must be known too, and it and they form a single fact for any consciousness large enough to embrace that world as a unity. But what constitutes this singleness of fact, this unity? Empiricism says, Nothing but the relation- yielding matrix in

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which the several items of the world find themselves embedded,—time, namely, and space, and the mind of the knower. And it says that were some of the items quite different from what they are and others the same, still, for aught we can see, an equally unitary world might be, provided each item were an object for consciousness and occupied a determinate point in space and time. All the adventitious relations would in such a world be changed, along with the intrinsic natures and places of the beings between which they obtained; but the ‘principle of totality ’ in knowledge would in no wise be affected.

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But Hegelism dogmatically denies all this to be possible. In the first place it says there are no intrinsic natures that may change; in the second it says there are no adventitious relations. When the relations of what we call a thing are told, no caput mortuum of intrinsicality, no

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‘nature, ’ is left. The relations soak up all there is of the thing; the ‘ items ’ of the world are

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but foci of relation with other foci of relation; and all the relations are necessary. The unity of

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the world has nothing to do with any ‘ matrix. ’ The matrix and the items, each with all, make

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a unity, simply because each in truth is all the rest. The proof lies in the hegelian principle of

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totality, which demands that if any one part be posited alone all the others shall forthwith emanate from it and infallibly reproduce the whole. In the modus operandi of the

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emanation comes in, as I said, that partnership of the principle of totality with that of the identity of contradictories which so recommends the latter to beginners in Hegel’ s

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philosophy. To posit one item alone is to deny the rest; to deny them is to refer to them; to refer to them is to begin, at least, to bring them on the scene; and to begin is in the fulness of time to end.

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If we call this a monism, Hegel is quick to cry, Not so! To say simply that the one item is the rest of the universe is as false and one- sided as to say that it is simply itself. It is both and

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neither; and the only condition on which we gain the right to affirm that it is, is that we fail

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not to keep affirming all the while that it is not, as well. Thus the truth refuses to be expressed

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in any single act of judgment or sentence. The world appears as a monism and a pluralism, just as it appeared in our own introductory exposition.

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But the trouble that keeps us and Hegel from ever joining hands over this apparent formula of

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brotherhood is that we distinguish, or try to distinguish, the respects in which the world is one from those in which it is many, while all such stable distinctio ns are what he most

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abominates. The reader may decide which procedure helps his reason most. For my own part, the time -honored formula of empiricist pluralism, that the world cannot be set down in any

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single proposition, grows less instead of more intelligible when I add, “And yet the different propositions that express it are one!” The unity of the propositions is that of the mind that harbors them. Any one who insists that their diversity is in any way itself their unity, can only do so because he loves obscurity and mystification for their own pure sakes.

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Where you meet with a contradiction among realities, Herbart used to say, it shows you have

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failed to make a real distinction. Hegel ’s sovereign method of going to work and saving all

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possible contradictions, lies in pertinaciously refusing to distinguish. He takes what is true of a term secundum quid, treats it as true of the same term simpliciter , and then, of course,

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applies it to the term secundum aliud. A good example of this is found in the first triad. This triad shows that the mutability of the real world is due to the fact that being constantly negates itself; that whatever is by the same act is not , and gets undone and swept away; and

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that thus the irremediable torrent of life about which so much rhetoric has been written has its roots in an ineluctable necessity which lies revealed to our logical reason. This notion of a being which forever stumbles over its own feet, and has to change in order to exist at all, is a very picturesque symbol of the reality, and is probably one of the points that make young readers feel as if a deep core of truth lay in the system.

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But how is the reasoning done? Pure being is assumed, without determinations, being secundum quid. In this respect it agrees with nothing. Therefore simpliciter it is

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nothing; wherever we find it, it is nothing; crowned with complete determinations then, or secundum aliud, it is nothing still, and hebt sich auf .

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It is as if we said, Man without his clothes may be named ‘ the naked. ’ Therefore

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man simpliciter is the naked; and finally man with his hat, shoes, and overcoat on is the

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naked still.

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Of course we may in this instance or any other repeat that the conclusion is strictly true, however comical it seems. Man within the clothes is naked, just as he is without them. Man would never have invented the clothes had he not been naked. The fact of his being clad at all does prove his essential nudity. And so in general,—the form of any judgment, being the addition of a predicate to a subject, shows that the subject has been conceived without the predicate, and thus by a strained metaphor may be called the predicate ’s negation. Well and

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good! let the expression pass. But we must notice this. The judgment has now created a new subject, the naked-clad, and all propositions regarding this must be judged on their own merits; for those true of the old subject, ‘the naked,’ are no longer true of this one. For instance, we cannot say because the naked pure and simple must not enter the drawing -room

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or is in danger of taking cold, that the naked with his clothes on will also take cold or must stay in his bedroom. Hold to it et ernally that the clad man is still naked if it amuse you, —’tis

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designated in the bond; but the so-called contradiction is a sterile boon. Like Shylock’s pound of flesh, it leads to no consequences. It does not entitle you to one drop of his Christian blood either in the way of catarrh, social exclusion, or what further results pure nakedness may involve.

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