# The Ethical Theory of Hegel/Chapter 2

We have seen that the dialectic is the process by which the principles of knowledge pass for thought from abstractness to concreteness, and that the moving force of the development is the logical compulsion exercised by the whole system within each of its fragments. We must now look at some of the special stages of this development in order to be able to determine the logical nature and position of the main conceptions which we must use in ethics. For this purpose it is desirable to pay special attention to some of the categories of the second division of the Logic, viz. the sphere of essence. It is not possible, of course, to deal with them all in their proper order and succession, but we may gain sufficient for our purpose if we take a suitable selection. I propose to indicate the general division of the Logic and to refer very briefly to the general nature of the categories of the first section. In connexion with the categories of essence I shall begin with the conception of ‘thinghood’ because it throws some light on the relation of mind to nature, and is of importance in any discussion of the transparency or opaqueness of nature to moral purposes. I shall then pass to the conception of substance, which has to be examined carefully for two reasons; firstly, because it, together with its subdivisions, manifests the full nature of the non-spiritual world, and contains within it the principle of necessity and external determination, and secondly because it is the stepping stone to the notion. The notion is itself the key to mind and the spiritual world in general; it is the logical principle of which the free self is the concrete realization. We may, therefore, consider somewhat closely the development of the dialectic from substance through causality and reciprocity into the notion.
Hegel’s logic falls into three main divisions or stages: first, the categories of being; second, the categories of ​essence; and third, the categories of the notion. These may be regarded as three main ways in which unity and difference may be presented in thought. Taking the matter in broad outline, there are three modes in which we may apprehend these two aspects. We may be offered any of three alternatives—(a) unity or difference, or (b) unity and difference, or (c) unity because of difference. Under the control of the categories of being we may say simply that a content ‘is’, and the negative aspect (non-being) may for the moment be entirely excluded from the explicit content of our thought. Or again we may say that it is one, excluding multiplicity; or many, excluding unity. This is the poorest form of thinking, and corresponds to the most superficial aspect of objects. The inadequacy of such principles is obvious and need not be laboured. In full truth every aspect of the intelligible world is in profound harmony with every other, and contains within it a reference to the whole. Hegel’s proof of this lies in the complete dialectic: the full implication of the whole in each aspect or fragment is not made fully clear until the end, viz. the stage of the notion (in the wide sense); the defects of the categories of being are, at their own proper stage, shown only externally, and fresh light is shed on their true nature at each step in the argument. The thinker who uses the categories of being, however, is far from apprehending this truth. He tries to isolate each aspect and to take it merely by itself. Each thing is itself, he says, and not another; and he is quite unaware of the deeper nature of each element whereby it has community with every other element and with the whole. We have seen the fate which overtakes this kind of thought. If we try to grasp reality under these categories it eludes us; reality will not be confined in these abstract forms, and the strange result which greets us is that it is Protean and changes as we hold it.
In the categories of essence this false simplicity and externality of thought begins to disappear. The thinker notes a distinction between the aspects of appearance and essence. The surface show of a thing is not its whole truth; behind that show there is a certain identity and permanence—an essence. As we progress in this series of categories we gradually discover that things are inter-connected; and ​we now see that we have not said the complete truth when we affirm that a thing is itself—it is also bound up with the rest of the universe and contains implications of the whole within the four corners of its being. We may take ‘thinghood’ as our first example of these principles of essence.
This is a very common category of ordinary thought, but it is not so simple as it may appear at first sight; and Hegel identifies it with the principle of sensible perception. We may note that a thing is not a simple quality, it is a totality of some sort standing in relation to differences; it is a thing with many properties. Each of these properties is distinct from the others, each has a being of its own and does not modify the others. The properties lie side by side, as it were, untouched by one another, and their relation is that of indifference. But at the same time they all come together; a thing is not a mere name given to a random collection of entirely unrelated qualities. In the Phenomenology Hegel points out that the unity in question is found chiefly in space and time. The treatment of thinghood in the two Logics is naturally more abstract, and Hegel speaks of the form of unity without pointing to the mode of concrete experience in which it is primarily manifested. Since we are not concerned with logic purely on its own account, it seems permissible to introduce here the type of experience which Hegel mentions in the Phenomenology, and has in mind in his discussion in the purely logical analysis. ‘This salt’, he says, ‘is a simple “Here” and at the same time manifold; it is white and also pungent, also cubical in shape, also of a specific weight, and so on. All these many properties exist in a simple “Here” where they inter-penetrate one another. None of these has a different “Here” from the others; each is everywhere in the same “Here” where the others are. At the same time, without being divided by different “Heres”, they do not affect each other in their interpenetration; its being white does not affect or alter the cubical shape it has, and neither affects its sharp outline, and so on. On the contrary each is simple relation-to-self, it leaves the others alone and is related to these merely by ​being also along with them, a relation of mere indifference. This “also” is thus the pure universal itself, the “medium”, the “thinghood” keeping them together.’ But there is more than this to be said about a thing. We have seen that the properties are different from one another, and this involves that they do stand in some relation to one another. If they were utterly and merely indifferent they would not even be distinguished, i.e. they would not be determinate qualities. The attributes of a thing, then, involve in their being a rudimentary opposition to one another. But in holding its properties apart the thing develops a further aspect in itself; it becomes more than a mere togetherness or inter-penetration of the properties. ‘The process of distinguishing them, so far as it does not leave them indifferent, but effectually excludes, negates one from another, thus falls outside the simple “medium”. And this, consequently, is not a mere also, a unity which is indifferent to what is in it, but a “one” as well, an excluding repelling unity.’ Thinghood thus implies a certain activity; the thing shuts out other properties and holds its own together. It is more than the sum, or the place, of its properties—it is something behind them, something which has them and which refuses to have others. It is an essence.
In this conception of thinghood we have the factors of more developed thought, at least in germ; but they are confused and not set in their proper relations. A thing is not a perfectly coherent object of thought. This does not mean that ‘things’ do not exist; indeed the analysis of thinghood is almost identical with the statement of the meaning of existence for Hegel. To exist is to present oneself thus in space and time; and if this form of presentation turns out to contain contradiction, the conclusion is not that it does not exist, but that existence itself is an inadequate and abstract mode of thought and reality. We may give definite names, for the sake of convenience, to the aspects of thinghood; the surface show, the attributes which when regarded as belonging to the thing are called properties, these are the immediate aspect, and the thing which has the properties is the mediate aspect. Thinghood is one of the many ways in which thought tries to relate these two ​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 ​essence in Hegel’s sense of the word; for the defect of all the categories of essence is that in their nature they involve other factors which are also external to them. Indeed, for theoretic reason, the transcendental ego is in a more evil plight than the thing, for the latter is at least present—at the minimum it is the unity of the ‘here’, and has spatial identity—but the pure ego must be abstracted even from space, it is pure identity as such and has no realization.
We may now come to the last main subdivision of the realm of essence, viz. reality; and in particular we may consider the transition from the conception of substance to the notion. As Hegel’s analysis goes deeper it endeavours to lose nothing that has been already gained; the distinction of mediate and immediate, or of essence and appearance, must therefore remain in the higher categories, but it must be thought in such a way that its incoherence disappears. Kant had already analysed substance in a somewhat one-sided way. He began with the fact of change, and found that change implies identity; change is change of something. If objects consisted of a mere succession in time we could not be conscious of change; each impression as it appeared would be all, and the problem of permanence would not arise for us. Change is essentially a principle of contrast, and has meaning only by reference to an underlying substance which has the change and remains one and the same throughout. Kant’s conception is very much that of an indestructible matter whose appearance alters and which takes different shapes, but whose quantity is constant. Kant’s analysis, however, is incomplete and one-sided. Substance, like the other categories of essence, is a correlative conception. Kant presupposes the one aspect, viz. difference or change, and deduces the other: Hegel tries to bring out the nature of both alike. Generally speaking, the elements of substance are those of thinghood over again at a deeper level and more closely bound together. Change, Kant has taught us, in order to be perceived must be determinate and must proceed in accordance with a rule. A mere flux would not be ​perceived as a unitary process at all, and hence not even as a flux. This determinate character of change is brought to the forefront by Hegel in his analysis of substance and accident. Substance advances beyond thinghood in two points. Firstly, the two aspects, essence and non-essential, are brought closer together, they are even identified; secondly, the accidents are thus conceived as not merely indifferent to one another, but as standing in a determinate relation and as forming a totality.
1. The unity of the thing and its properties is a loose one; the thing is the medium of the properties, and can often be deprived of one of them without loss of identity. A house may be painted a different colour and yet be the same house. Substance, however, is its accidents; it appears in them and exists only in appearing. The word, substance, is sometimes used in an abstract and one-sided way as referring to a mere identity behind or beneath its attributes, a mere substrate. This interpretation Hegel considers to be inadequate. He prefers to speak simply of essence when the object is so conceived, and to retain the word substance for the object, which is thought under the conception that is here analysed. The sense he rejects can be found as the guiding conception of certain would-be philosophical physicists. In the effort to penetrate to the nature of ‘matter’ the thinker sometimes forgets that in the appropriate category, viz. that of substance, the essence exists only in appearing. The accidents of substance are, of course, the subordinate and even the unessential aspects; but this is falsely taken when it is supposed that they can be brushed aside as non-existent or as subjective. Sometimes in the effort to think matter the investigator strips off each of its properties and functions as unessential and superficial. But unluckily at the end, instead of discovering what matter is, he finds in his hands a bare identity with no intelligible content—the mere emptiness of ultimate abstraction. Too often the thinker proclaims the bankruptcy not only of his special category but of reason as a whole. The inner nature of things, he says, is an inscrutable mystery, and no human wit can read the riddle which has baffled him. The mystery, however, is of his own making, ​and he has failed to find the meaning of matter because it has been identified with a substrate which has no attributes, and is in truth nothing at all.
Substance exists only in appearing; it is not the mere togetherness of thinghood, but a more intense unity constituted by the accidents in determinate relation to one another. How is this unity to be understood? Perhaps the physical conception of energy is the clearest instance of it. Energy remains constant in quantity through all its changes, and is a permanent amid variety. Yet it exists only in its forms, it is not a colourless substrate of which the definite forms are illusory appearances. The destruction of one of the forms would destroy it itself. When we think by means of the conception of substance we organize the material of knowledge into a whole such that the details are set in their place by a necessity which flows through them. Their difference, thus, is not the last word about them, for each of them is the embodiment of the one substance; their nature is to reveal the immanent whole.
2. Substance appears in its accidents as power or necessity, Kant, approaching the question from one side, had asked the nature of the principle which made it possible for mind to have duration or permanence presented to it in the object; and he found that there is required for that end the permanence of the phenomenal substrate itself, an enduring object which is the bearer of all change. Hegel, rejecting the one-sided approach and bringing both aspects, change as well as permanence, within the scope of the deduction, renders the conception as that of substance appearing as power in its modes. Substance gives itself actual shape by establishing one form or accident, then passes into another, so that the first accident is withdrawn by it and replaced by another. Substance is thus a category of necessity. The full meaning of necessity is not yet realized, and will appear only later; but substance differs from thinghood in that its attributes are not indifferent to it but express it and constitute a determinate order by virtue of this inner power which ‘posits’ ​them. Each is only what substance makes it, and cannot stand when substance withdraws itself and takes another shape.
The nature of substance, thus, may be summed up in three phases: the self identity of substance and the variety of the accidents; the immanence of substance in the accidents; the power of substance over the accidents.
We may now look at the defects of this conception when taken as a final category. Briefly, they spring from the fact that the unity of substance is abstract. The two aspects, universal and particular, have been brought within the compass of one thought, but they are still external to one another. Substance is the self-identity of the process, and although it exists only in the variety of the accidents, yet it does not include that variety as part of its own nature. The explanation which uses substance as its highest principle dissolves the particular in the universal; it traces the universal in the particular, but it does not take the universal concretely. If the conception of physical energy is used in such a way that it embodies this principle, then explanation will consist in tracing the identity of the quantity of energy in the consecutive forms; potential energy will be resolved into an equal quantity of kinetic energy, that into heat, and so on. The constant quantity of energy will be regarded as the reality, and thought will be satisfied when the quantitative identity is demonstrated.
The defects of this method of thinking are obvious, for no account is given of the transformation from the one mode to the next. The change of the accidents falls without substance; and when the accidents are resolved into substance their aspect of difference and variety is lost. The essence of the situation appears to be this. Substance is the all-pervading power in each accident and is the reality of each; but in referring an accident to substance we do not organize the accidents into a systematic whole, but merely dig within each for the hidden identity. We find, e.g., that the quantity of energy in question is present in the kinetic form and are satisfied; we do not trace the peculiar nature of the kinetic form back into potential energy and forward into heat. That is to say, we do not regard the differences as fundamental to substance, and so we explain each form not by its context ​but by its immanent principle. Substance thus is to be identified with merely inner necessity, and has not yet developed into a system of inter-acting parts. But substance can have necessary power over its accidents only if its power appear in the accident itself, for substance exists only in appearing. The necessity of the whole ought to have an adequate manifestation, and should appear in each accident as the power modifying and determining the others. That is to say, the inward necessity must also appear outwardly. Since the accidents manifest substance they ought to show in themselves the power of substance, i.e. they ought to determine one another. Hegel puts the point thus: ‘The show, or accidentality, is intrinsically substance through the power; but it is not posited as this self-identical show. [The accidental is the evanescent.] Thus substance has as its actual shape or positivity only the accidental, and not itself; it is not substance as substance. The relation of substantiality reduces itself to substance which reveals itself as formal power, but whose differences are not substantial; in fact, it is only the inward of the accidents, and the latter are only in substance.’
Hegel’s general meaning may be expressed in another way which will apply more directly to the ethical questions we have to consider afterwards. Substance is conceived as the underived and supreme, but the thought is one-sided. Substance is the ground of the accidents, and they receive their justification and truth from it; their immediate appearance is traced back to substance and based on it. But, on the other hand, substance does not ground itself in its accidents, it is prior to them and does not develop through their change. What is posited is the accident and not substance: substance is the original, the underived. Now this conception has, perhaps unwittingly, been used by many thinkers who treat of freedom. Freedom is represented by them as that which is not bound, that which acts in the world but is not enthralled by it. Time, change, and accident, they say, do not enter into freedom; and the attempt to explain a man by his time, his parentage, his training, and so forth, they regard as a weak surrender to the forces of determinism. The inward freedom of the will, on this view, cannot be bound by the ​acts in which it appears, and hence is untouched by any actual consequences it may produce. Kant’s teaching leads to something like this: for him freedom is merely inward; we ought to act, he holds, as if we were members of a kingdom of ends. Libertarianism carries the conception to the extreme. Naturally, too, the determinist accepts the same view of freedom, and the rival schools strive within the unity of a common assumption. The indeterminist accepts this underived existence as a fact, while the determinist, on the other hand, is unable to find room for it within the world of knowledge. Now, we must discern that the category of substance is not adequate to freedom: the conception is in truth self-contradictory. Substance makes the most important of all assumptions—it assumes itself. This difficulty is often felt in regard to freedom. One of the arguments for determinism is that the will is bound by the character; actions spring of necessity from the nature of the agent, and he has no control over his character. The utmost reply the indeterminist can make to this is that the agent is not determined by external circumstances, i.e. by environment. But this reply, even supposing its truth, is not sufficient. For the whole man is more than a bare character; he is a living concrete agent, with both structure and function, an indissoluble unity of inward and outward. And when a separation is made between the two aspects, the character is no more equivalent to the man as a whole than is environment; it becomes a force working in him from behind, and its externality is as real as that of circumstances, although that takes a temporal form while this is chiefly spatial. That is to say, for ethical purposes the alleged underived character of man’s nature comes to the same thing as external derivation. The self has no power over itself, and the mysterious inborn nature of it is an alien force.
This is the characteristic defect of the categories of essence. Substance must have accidents, it exists only in its accidents; but yet it gains nothing by going out into them. It is in se and not in alio; yet it is only in going forth into finitude. The two aspects, mediate and immediate, universal and particular, unity and difference, infinite and finite, original ​and derivative, or however else one likes to name them, lie side by side in the categories of essence. They are both present, but they are not harmonized. The terms are correlative, and each has a nature of its own. Substance is the permanent and powerful, the accidental is the unstable and impotent; and their mutual implication is merely another factor along side the others, on equal terms with them. Each term, as it were, falls into two; on one side it is private, on the other it has outward relations: but the two aspects are not reconciled, they merely go together.
In the effort to find more adequate principles of thought we have to do two things. Firstly, we have to incorporate the element of difference more thoroughly within the positive principle; secondly, we have to regard the positive principle not merely as underived, but as self-derived. Hegel begins to perform the first of these tasks within the realm of essence itself, and thereby provides the transition to the third and last main section of the dialectic where the second task is also accomplished.
Substance is present in each of its shapes; in a sense, then, each accident is substance. Hegel at this stage takes the identity of substance with its accidents in full earnestness, and treats it as something else than a mere phase added to the others. Substance is inner necessity, the immanent power over the accidents; but if this inner necessity is to be intelligible it must come out, and the accidents must become in their external character what they are inherently. That is to say, we must surrender that aspect of the conception of substance according to which the accidents do not determine one another, and must grant to them as to substance manifest, power over one another. This gives us the category of causality. In pure substance the accidents merely pass into one another; in causality they determine one another. In the relation of substantiality A follows B because of the ​necessity of substance in each; in the relation of causality A, as the embodiment of substance, determines and produces B. Substance in this conception has dirempted itself into two shapes, each of which is itself substantial. Two points require emphasis here.
The ordinary conception of causality is dogmatic and rests on unexamined assumptions. It begins by assuming separate things, finds that they follow one another in a determinate order, but instead of thinking out what is involved in this determinate order gives it a name, causality, and passes to some easier problem. The main difficulties in causality arise from the assumption that cause and effect are purely separate facts, and that the relation between them, viz. invariable sequence, is external to their nature. Naturally, if we grant that in full truth A and B are merely self-identical, any essential relation between them is unintelligible. Hume made this assumption, and in consequence reduced causality to mere sequence together with the expectation engendered by the experience of that sequence in the past. Kant saw that if causality is to be intelligible as an objective relation, the assumption of the absolute independence and self-sufficiency of its factors must be given up; and in his view the relation is constitutive of the terms. Causality, the type of objective order, is an a priori principle for Kant, without which the unity of the subject and hence knowledge in general is impossible. In Kant’s theory, however, there is a gap between this transcendental principle and the concrete matter of sense by which it is filled; and so far as the empirical sequence of events is concerned, Kant stands very close to Hume’s position, not discerning the imperative need for the revision of the hard and fast boundaries between perceived objects. Hegel brings out the identity of cause and effect in a way which Kant failed to do. Kant’s view is confined in effect to the necessity of the objective coherence of events in time and space; Hegel realizes that in order to think this coherence we must be prepared to take the identity of the factors seriously, and not be content with its mere ​assertion as a transcendental principle in conjunction with an uncritical view of the phenomena of experience. The cause, Hegel insists, is cause only in the effect, and the effect is such only in relation to the cause; the two aspects have an identical content. This may be clearer if we discuss an imaginary objection to it. It is admitted, it may be said, that the real meaning of the conception is the transformation of energy from one phase to another. The cause of the heat generated by the impact of a bullet on a target is the kinetic energy of the moving bullet, but the previous shape of the energy does not pass into the later one. The shapes alternate; the constant content is merely a constant quantity of energy. Thus Hegel’s statement seems to go too far, the truth being that cause and effect have only in part a common content, while in part each has also a private element, viz. the shape or form of the energy. In reply to this statement it may be said that the conception embodied by it is not causality but substance. It was this omission of difference that set the problem which Hegel is here trying to solve, and it is hardly probable that he overlooked this. Hegel’s illustrations are not always the truest index of his meaning, but he does seem to meet this difficulty. In the Encyclopaedia he says, ‘The rain (the cause) and the wet (the effect) are the self-same existing water. In point of form the cause (rain) is dissipated or lost in the effect (wet): but in that case the result can no longer be described as effect; for without the cause it is nothing, and we should have only the unrelated wet left.’ The cause involves its effect in its conception, and vice versa. ‘Both cause and effect are thus one and the same content: and the distinction is primarily only that the one lays down, and the other is laid down.’ But if this be so, there is only one substance present; only in the effect does the cause become cause. That is to say, the cause determines itself, and in going into the effect it is really becoming itself. ‘The cause, consequently, is in its full truth causa sui.’ The difficulty which ordinary thought has in grasping this ​conception may be due to its inveterate habit of taking time determinations as final. When the effect is present, it says, the cause is past, and surely the past cannot be present. If we are to understand the conception of causality, however, we must rise above this naïve view; we must remember that we are looking for a connexion that is not broken by the passage of time, and that the externality of moments of time to one another cannot be the last word on the subject. If time enters at all its proper place is within the single content, not between two isolated facts with separate contents of their own. Further, one must rise above mere picture thinking. A material effect does not have a material reproduction of its cause inside it; we are dealing with conceptions, not with images. If a material thing is conceived as cause, it contains in its conception a reference to that which it produces; and if the two are separated in time it is only by thinking a unity which can transcend temporal distinctions that we can think of causality at all.
Secondly, we must note the other aspect. Following Hegel’s view of causa sui, we have seen that he regards cause and effect as one content. But this unity is not achieved at the expense of difference: such a course would imply ​entire failure to cope with the problem which substance left on Hegel’s hands. Cause and effect must be two as well as one; for if their difference were neglected the whole conception of production would vanish, and, as Hegel says, ‘we should have only the unrelated wet left.’ Substance divides itself into appearances which are themselves substantial: that is to say, substance has not only to appear in each factor but also as each, and in its conception it must include the operation of the accidents on and in each other.
The conception of causality, thus, involves two points of view. Cause and effect are two substantial terms, and they are one substance. Identity and difference are balanced against one another, but they do not properly cohere. Perhaps the general position is expressed most clearly when we say that the nature of the cause is to pass into an effect which is other than itself. In interpreting Hegel here we must not be misled by the emphasis he lays on the conception of causa sui: that is the point which is new to us, and we are apt to lose sight of the other aspect. The precise way in which causality unites unity and difference must be carefully noted, because a failure to take it sufficiently concretely will give us an abstract view of the higher category, the notion. Causality is the embodiment of necessity: in a causal series nothing can call itself its own; everything has been made what it is by forces which are other than it and which it regards as alien. That is to say, in causality itself the inherent unity is not yet in its own true form, it is not able to master and possess the element of difference. To put it another way, the aspects of the conception of causality, viz. identity and difference, pass immediately into one another, and the rationale of the movement is seen but imperfectly. This analysis may be difficult to apprehend at first sight, but it is involved in concrete shape in countless numbers of our ordinary judgements. We do mean something when we say that one thing becomes another, and we do not mean simply that one thing always follows another. Common sense does not know that Kant has shown that things are related in time only in virtue of a further relation of the things themselves, and that points of time are meaningless apart from a specific content within them. But it does feel that when the empiricists reduce ​causality to unconditional sequence (whatever unconditional may mean), they have omitted an identity—connexion if you will—that common sense asserts. When A becomes B, A does not merely pass away and B arise; A becomes that which it is not: the cause becomes an effect, other than it, yet involving it in its conception as effect. This is a contradiction, but it is asserted by every judgement of causality; and it is difficult to see how it can be expressed otherwise than by saying that in causality the identity of cause and effect is immediately one with their difference. The cause and the effect have nothing in them that is not in the other also; their being is not their own. In the Larger Logic Hegel draws a careful line between the categories of substance and the categories of necessity, but the distinction is too minute to occupy us here. Causality is the embodiment of necessity; and the nature of both principles lies in the dissipation of a thing into externality. A thing is compelled and does not act freely when a process, which works in it, and as it, cancels it and sets it up as something else. If one looks carefully, one sees that an external force acts on a thing only because the thing answers to it and that it is not merely external; but the relation is that of necessity when the very nature of the thing, in virtue of which it might claim to be self-determining, is not its own, but is constituted in it and as it from without. Hegel insists that any natural object which is subject to necessity is unable to sustain the contradiction within it. When the externality of its content or substance becomes apparent the thing is destroyed: only a higher principle than causality can attain unity and selfhood in and through externality.
At first, however, the conception which we have stated is not complete. The one factor is called cause or active, the other effect or passive; and only part of the full meaning of substance is given in each element. The unity already found ​in causality demands more than this, and hence in order to realize itself the conception becomes that of reciprocity. A preliminary effort to remove the difficulty may be made by conceiving an endless chain of causes each of which is the effect of a preceding cause and the cause of a subsequent effect. This, however, gives inadequate satisfaction to the identity of causality stated in the doctrine of causa sui; and we are forced to the conception of reciprocity. The nature of the effect depends not only on the cause, but also on the passive factor, i.e. that in which the effect is produced. The cause does not act in the void, but presupposes something else on which to operate. The so-called passive factor must therefore be conceived as cause with reference to this event, and not merely to a subsequent one; for without it the cause would not have its character as active. Further, the form of activity exercised by the cause depends on and varies with the other factor; hence the result is the common product of an interaction. Causality thus implies an action and reaction of elements in which each is both cause and effect of the other; each becomes itself in determining the other.
It is through the conception of reciprocity that we pass beyond the sphere of essence altogether; and we must be careful to note exactly where we stand. In tracing substance into the truer category of reciprocity it is important that the positive side of the former should not be lost. We have seen substance sunder itself into individual factors which were respectively cause and effect, and we insisted that it is still one substance which appears thus. Cause and effect are two and also one; and we have refused to lighten the difficulty by casting overboard the aspect of unity. For the position does not become any easier in that way, and the case becomes without remedy if we assume that we are dealing with inherently indifferent and unrelated factors. This remains true of reciprocity, and we are faced with the same problem still. When the world is thought under the conception of reciprocity it becomes a system of mutually determining parts, ​each of which is substantial, and each of which is necessary to make the others what they are. They interact, and achieve their own being only in determining others and in being determined by these others. Each thing is part of a system, and has no character except in so far as it reacts on other things and is in turn reacted on by them—only by going out of itself and establishing other things has it a private or inward nature of its own. This is the highest principle of essence, and in it the difficulties come to a head. The contradiction which infects the whole realm is this: the factors of its categories have a private independent nature, and at the same time involve a reference to something other than themselves. Thus the ‘thing’ is the mere medium of its attributes, but it involves a reference to these attributes and to the concrete detail which lies outside the mere unity of ‘togetherness’. Similarly, substance is the original, the underived, that which is in itself; but it involves a reference to the particular differences of the attributes which inhere in it. In reciprocity the contradiction is acute; for the only private being of each term is the reference beyond itself to other factors of the system; its nature is to establish them. Consequently, it is always easy to attack any content of knowledge which is erected on this plan and to dissipate its structure to the winds by setting the aspects against one another. There are no relations without terms, the criticism says, and the only terms offered are nothing but relations.
This point of view may be clearer if we consider a concrete instance of it; and we may take as an example Spencer’s criticism of altruistic Hedonism. ‘The sympathetic nature gets pleasure by giving pleasure; and the proposition is that if the general happiness is the object of pursuit, each will be made happy by witnessing others’ happiness. But what in such case constitutes the happiness of others? These others are also by the hypothesis pursuers and receivers of altruistic pleasure. The genesis of altruistic pleasure in each is to depend on the display of pleasures by others; which is again to depend on the display of pleasures by others; and so on perpetually. Where, then, is the pleasure to begin? Obviously ​there must be egoistic pleasure somewhere before there can be the altruistic pleasure caused by sympathy with it. Obviously, therefore, each must be egoistic in due amount, even if only with the view of giving others the possibility of being altruistic. So far from the sum of happiness being made greater if all make general happiness the exclusive end, the sum disappears entirely.’ Spencer sees clearly enough that in a reciprocal system the nature of each term forbids that the other terms with which it co-operates should be self-contained, and also that the other terms are not this one but are definitely other than it. His point is that in the system of altruistic pleasures each individual has no substantial satisfaction and depends for his pleasures on others who have none of their own to give.
Now, how is this difficulty to be surmounted? Any solution is to be rejected which simply drops out an element and falls back on some conception already shown in the dialectic to be imperfect. We must find some conception which will retain all that this one has in it, and yet avoid its defect. This is, in brief, what Hegel does. He brings us to see that in a reciprocal system we have something which is inherently more than a set of mutually determining parts. The paradox which troubles us rests on an assumption, viz. that we have to begin from the point of view of an isolated individual. It is quite true, for example, that if we have to understand the moral ideal by beginning with the pleasure of a private individual and working over from that to the others, the whole conception is self-contradictory. For in stating that the pleasure of the individual comes only from that of others we have robbed the individual of a substantiality which cannot be restored to him from others which are in a like case. The step we have to take is to recognize that there is more present than one term and others, there is the whole. We have assumed the substantial unity running through the terms, but we have not thought of taking it as the main feature and proper starting-point. We have tried to enter the system at the side, as it were, and we failed; we may now try to enter into the spirit of the system as a whole and recognize that it is the true individual.
Before proceeding, we may gather together the main points ​which have emerged. Substance, we saw, appeared in its accidents and exercised power over them; but it was faulty because it could not give an adequate account of difference, and because it did not really determine itself in its accidents. It constituted or posited its accidents, but presupposed its own nature. The first of these defects was partly removed by causality and reciprocity, where substance divided itself into manifestations which were themselves substantial. Reciprocity, however, is an imperfect category, for it sets the negative element on equal terms with the positive and dissipates everything it touches. When thought leaves the seemingly solid standing-ground of the particular, it demands some support on which it may stand and find rest. Reciprocity has turned out to be a veritable flux, and endless movement into externality. The step which thought now takes brings it out of this infinite relativity. There is only one thing stable, and that is the whole; and whenever thought lays hold of experience as a self-articulating principle, the negative element—relativity—becomes subordinated to the positive. This is the point of view of the notion. To revert to our former terminology, experience has ceased to be merely one and many, a one that is also many, and has become one because of its multiplicity and difference. The notion is a principle which owns its differences, and in developing an opposite brings into explicit being a unity strong enough to sustain and include the opposition within it.
By over-reaching the relativity of its content and including difference and externality within itself, thought has transcended the second flaw in the conception of substance, viz. the mere presupposition of the essence. The system is an organism. It appears in its members; their acts are its acts, and in their mutual determination of one another it determines itself. If we regard the nature of the principle and of each of its manifestations as private and self-centred, as something which stays at home with itself and is purely self-contained, then the notion is unintelligible. In order to understand it we must see that the nature of each member is found in an outgoing activity, and that what it establishes is not merely alien but is also itself. The inward nature of the thing and its outward reference are not merely conjoined, as in essence; they are identical. This is also true of the ​system as a whole. The principle—the notion—establishes itself in its members, and the act whereby each posits itself in its other is a process whereby the whole establishes itself. Thus the one-sidedness of the relation of substance disappears in the notion, for the latter posits itself in and as its accidents. Substance is absolute merely because it is underived; the notion is absolute because it is self-determined. The movement of the accidents has become a movement of substance itself, and the outward reference falls now within the whole, not merely as an additional factor, but as an integral element. It is that through which the notion realizes itself. Thus the notion is a category of activity; its nature is to go out of itself and find itself in this movement.
There is nothing mysterious in the statement that the notion is absolute not because it is underived but because it is self-determining. There is a dangerous tendency in thought to revert to the principles of essence when dealing with the notion, and to raise old problems which have really been answered. In this mood it is urged that the self-determination of the notion does not free it from the difficulties of substance; it, too, has a nature which it must presuppose. And this logical problem is the basis of the charge that Hegel’s conception of freedom amounts merely to that of a so-called spiritual mechanism, determinism in a subtler medium. Now, in dealing with this difficulty it is important to see clearly what is at issue. Doubtless the notion has a nature, but that is not a defect—it is not the defect we urged against substance. The question is, Must the notion presuppose its nature in the same sense as that which was found to mar the conception of substance? We may therefore ask for a clearer statement of the meaning of presupposition in this connexion. We have seen that substance is in truth indeterminate. Accidents, of course, appear on the surface, and substance dwells in them and has power over them. But there are within it no differences to account for the differences it produces in its appearance; it is indwelling and hidden. When we force this point to the utmost it yields the conclusion that substance does nothing. Doubtless it posits its accidents and determines them; but how can there be a power that acts and is unaffected by its action? Substance is unmoved; and the movement must therefore be in some ​way illusion—if substance is the whole truth. But against this we have to set the reality of the movement; for to deny the movement is to annihilate the accidents and substance along with them. Substance, therefore, is not indeterminate; since it acts it must have within it principles of action, means for the production of differences. What are we to make of this antinomy? The first side, the indeterminate aspect, is the outer show, the appearance which substance wears when it is not taken with the light of the notion upon it; and it is the vacuity into which inadequate thought must retire. The second aspect, the inward determinateness of substance, is a statement of the nature of substance in the knowledge of that which it becomes in the upward trend of thought. Substance must be determinate, but at its own proper level this determinateness is hidden and not made open. Therein lies the underived character. The charge, then, is no gratuitous one; it voices the demand that substance should show what shape it has, and insists that substance seems to be a featureless abyss merely because it is in shadow.
The point may be put in other words. In any ordered world of thought which has risen to the level of substance, change and process find a place. And such change has an explanation. But if the first principle, substance itself, contain no such explanation, then beyond it there lie forces and powers which it cannot control, and which are alien to it. But the first principle, substance, at the same time claims supremacy and completeness; it itself is the sole truth: and hence it falls into contradiction with itself. Substance may reconcile the discrepancy only by genuinely accepting the determinateness of its accidents as its own proper content. It will then leave nothing standing beyond it to bind it, and it will have a right to claim as its own those powers which it asserts to be concealed within it.
It is this step that the notion has taken; it has brought into harmony the implicit nature and the overt appearance. The first step appears to be one of renunciation; the supreme has limited itself in each of its members. But that step, though essential, is only one side of a complete act; for the principle thereby gains the whole as its content, and all that is falls within its scope. Growth, we have been told, is not mere aggregation, it is creation. And the nature of ​spirit, we are assured, is to pass for ever into forms which are unique and new. Hegel might agree with this, but he would certainly add that at the same time spirit was only coming to its own full stature. The notion is a principle whose nature is to elaborate itself from within and to become a concrete system. The factors are embodiments of the whole, they are organs in which the whole is present as such, and each, when taken in its context and truth, has the power and value of the whole. Thus the notion—unlike substance—expresses itself in a form which is worthy of it, and in going into its opposite it is realizing what there is in it to be. Its inherent nature is brought out in its development; and it is—in Hegel’s terminology—for itself what it is in itself, an und für sich, the absolute.
It may be useful to express this conception with reference to the terms universal and particular. Previous to Hegel no thinker succeeded in resolving the opposition between these two. Aristotle’s conception of the individual is ambiguous, because at times he seems to regard it as the union of two disparate elements, matter and form, while at others he treats it as the infima species itself. It seems fair to suppose that, on the whole, Aristotle’s thought was dualistic, and that he regarded the universal as incapable in itself of giving the concrete detail of life. Universal and particular do come together for him, as in Hegel’s categories of essence, but the reason of their union is not present in their nature. Even Spinoza failed to meet the difficulty. Unlike Aristotle he refuses to give the particular any content that is beyond the universal; but in bringing the particular within the universal he restricts the nature of the former and does not do justice to its negative aspect. In Hegel’s category of the notion the universal is not merely an abstract principle which is made concrete by being dipped in a foreign matter, such as the matter of sense intuition; it is a concrete whole having internal differences, the equipoise of opposed yet united aspects. On the other hand, the particular is not an exclusive unit—it is a way in which the system appears; its nature is in no part merely private but is drawn from the whole. The notion obliges us to affirm the identity of the universal and the particular; and in concrete thinking the two aspects are at one with each other, and each is the other.
​This identity of opposites is, of course, the great stumbling-block in Hegel’s logic to many minds, and it has been the butt of much mockery. But to reject this category is to deny the validity of every step of the path to it. Hegel has already shown the identity (not the sameness) of opposites. It is there for the thinker who traces the dialectic. Being turned in our hands into not-being or nothing; that which merely is, equally is not. The identity is there and is patent in the dialectic, although it is not manifest to the mind limited to such principles. If imperfect thoughts do imply their opposites, there must be some more perfect principle of thought within which this implication falls as content. And such thought is an identity of opposites. In this category of the notion Hegel has brought within the content of thought the power which gave the dialectic life; the dialectic has now become for itself what it is in itself. If we, in real earnest, reject this position, it is difficult to see what shift thought can make. There is no stable mean between the utter nominalism of Antisthenes and the concrete logic which treats the assertion of the identity of different things not as a sign of the impotence of thought, but as a statement of the nature of reason and of reality. When we think coherently, so that the identity of the universal and particular is manifest, the result is the concrete universal or true individual. The unity lives only in the differences, and the latter have their meaning and being only in the whole which they utter forth. The universal which does not thus articulate itself is abstract; it is at most a common element—a glorified particular—and hence not really a universal at all. Similarily, the particular abstracted from its context loses all that makes it what it is, it lapses into the pure being which is nothing. The concrete universal, thus, or the notion, is the truth both of the universal and of the particular; it is the category where they are identical.
This analysis, however, must not be understood abstractly; the identity in question does not exclude difference. The fault of Spinoza’s philosophy is that he achieves unity at the expense of difference; he files down the two aspects until they have an indifferent shape and so can be mistaken for one another. But for Hegel the negative aspect, difference, tension, opposition, is a moment—though only a moment. ​The universal must limit itself, must take on the forms of finitude, and preserve that finitude even while going beyond it. We shall see later how the self, which is the actual embodiment of the notion, denies itself and goes forth into its other, into a world which is the not-self. The outgoing moment is essential and in the spiritual life it involves strenuous effort and bitter sacrifice; indeed the concreteness of the identity of the whole depends on the stress of the outward process. There is not full joy in the harmony of thought if in its nature it has not gone into a far country. To minimize the reality of the alienation is to diminish the fullness of the union, and to translate an identity of opposites into a bare tautology.
We cannot trace in detail Hegel’s analysis of the sphere of the notion; but it is necessary to note one distinction. The description we have given is that of the character of the whole of the third division of the logic, which is called in general the doctrine of the notion. But the sphere comprises a number of categories of differing grades. The name, ‘notion’, is given by Hegel to the first of these as well as to the whole; and the last one, the only adequate and complete principle of thought, is called the ‘idea’. It is perhaps enough for our purposes to say that the notion, in the narrow sense, is the principle of such a system capable of complete articulation but as yet undeveloped. The ‘idea’ is the complete system actually seen to be the concretion of the simple immanent principle. The notion involves the ‘idea’, and is the bud of which the latter is the fruit. The former is inward, immanent, undeveloped: the latter is always an inward principle which expresses itself outwardly and has actually mastered the external. The ‘idea’ is the truth of the notion, the full self into which the notion develops itself. In the sequel, unless the context forbids, it is to be assumed that the term, notion, is used to indicate the narrow category rather than the whole sphere, for the distinction between the principle and the concrete achievement is of great importance. But we cannot dwell longer on the point in its bare logical form, and can characterize it further only in more concrete embodiments.
By way of transition to this more concrete realm we may discuss a possible misconception of the meaning of Hegel’s ​analysis. We have spoken of the identity of opposites, but we are not thereby committed to the absurd statement that all opposites are identical, and that it is a matter of indifference whether we say yea or nay. The categories are not themselves the world, they are at most the principles of it; and, although from a scientific point of view they are the more weighty aspect, yet in their abstractness they are a poor substitute for a world constituted by them. That is to say, when we have analysed a category we have only stated a demand; the task still remains of satisfying that demand, of finding or organizing an experience which manifests the form of unity that the category reveals. It is one thing, e.g., to determine in the abstract the nature of substance, and another to possess a content of knowledge which in all its concreteness is itself a substance. Similarly, in the notion the demand for a world or medium in which the unity of opposites is achieved is not lightly satisfied. Ignoring for the present the difficult problem of the ultimate relation of the various spheres to one another, we may represent the various categories as the principles of various grades or realms of experience. Form and matter are inter-dependent, and each matter has a limit to its capacity of yielding forms. Some matter of experience is, as it were, too coarse to take on the finer forms, and the higher categories cannot be realized in it; on the other hand, some matter is inherently too fine to be held by the rougher and less adequate forms. Hegel does not seek to find the notion and the ‘idea’ in their proper shapes in the purely physical world of space and motion; the lower categories in which externality predominates are the appropriate form of such stuff. Nor does he suppose that the categories of being, or even of essence, can give us the truth of the moral and intellectual life of mind. The proper field for the notion is self-conscious mind, and the ego is the realization of that principle. If we are unable to think the nature of the notion in the abstract, and must have examples of it in the concrete in order that the ‘identity of opposites’ be more than ​a confused phrase, it is only in the life of self-conscious rational mind that illustrations can be found. The opposites of external nature are not identical for thought; the sphere is, therefore, in itself, confined to and governed by lower categories, and is not fully rational. Mind alone over-reaches its other, denies itself in order to find itself, and brings the notion into being. In discussing the Philosophy of Right itself we may see more closely the way in which logical demands are met by the ethical life, and to what extent the answers are adequate.
* ↑ Cf. above, p. 12 f.
* ↑ There are three accounts of the nature of thinghood; Phenomenology, WW. II. pp. 84-99; Larger Logic, WW. IV. Abschnitt 2, Kap. I; Encyclopaedia, WW. VI. § 125 ff.
* ↑ WW. II. pp. 86-7, Baillie’s trans. I. pp. 107-8.
* ↑ Ibid.
* ↑ For a slightly different view of the progress of the Logic—particularly in regard to causality—v. McTaggart’s Commentary on Hegel's Logic.
* ↑ Energy is an equally good form of the principle.
* ↑ V. Encyclopaedia, § 125 note, last sentence.
* ↑ V. Larger Logic, WW. IV. p. 221.
* ↑ ‘Substance, as this identity of the appearing, is the totality of the whole, and includes the accidents; and the accidental is the whole substance itself’ (Larger Logic, II. p. 221).
* ↑ V. Critique of Pure Reason, First Analogy.
* ↑ Larger Logic, WW. IV. p. 223.
* ↑ Hegel indicates the sublation of the past in the identity of thinghood in the Encyclopaedia, § 125.
* ↑ ‘The accidents, as such, . . . have no power over one another. . . . In so far as such an accident seems to exercise a power over another, it is the power of substance which grasps both in itself, as negativity [i.e. as negating power] posits an unequal value, and determines the one as the passing, gives the other another content and determines it as the subsisting, or, in other words, determines the former as lapsing into its possibility and the latter as coming into reality’ (Larger Logic, WW. IV. p. 222).
* ↑ For a brief account of Kant’s view of causality v. Adamson, On the Philosophy of Kant, pp. 57-66; cf. Macmillan, The Crowning Phase of the Critical Philosophy, pp. 127-34, where stress is laid on the ambiguous position of inner sense in Kant’s view.
* ↑ Cf. McTaggart, Commentary on Hegel’s Logic, §§ 173-4.
* ↑ Cf. Bosanquet in Mind, January 1911, p. 82.
* ↑ § 153, Wallace’s trans, p. 277.
* ↑ Ibid. § 153 note, Wallace’s trans, p. 278.
* ↑ Ibid. § 153, Wallace’s trans, p. 277.
* ↑ ‘There is at any rate a presumption against the truth of this doctrine. It is against the ordinary usage of language. In ordinary empirical propositions about finite things we never find ourselves asserting that A is the cause of A, but always that A is the cause of B. The Cause and Effect are always things which, irrespective of their being Cause and Effect, have different names. The presumption is that there must be some difference between things to which different names are generally given’ (McTaggart, Commentary on Hegel’s Logic, p. 176). For Hegel one of the disadvantages of the ordinary usage of language is that it is quite unable to apprehend at once the mutual implications of unity and difference, that in its clumsy analysis of itself it is content to have things either the same or different, and that it is bewildered when its attention is drawn to the concrete categories of the notion towards which the dialectic is here tending and which it cannot avoid embodying in the concrete. He would probably be surprised, however, to find a philosopher setting forth the inadequacies of ordinary speech against the concreteness—the incipient unity of opposites—of the higher categories of essence. Cf. Encyclopaedia, § 153 n.
* ↑ This does not mean that time is eliminated by causality, or that the unity in question is an abstract strand indifferent to change. Causa sui finds its full truth only in the notion, or ultimately the ‘idea’, which is a system containing all determinations within it as content.
* ↑ V. Larger Logic, WW. IV. pp. 230-5; Encyclopaedia, § 154.
* ↑ Dr. McTaggart is not wrong in appealing to ordinary speech in this connexion: his error, I think, is in making the appeal to one aspect in order to exclude another. His argument in effect opposes one moment of the conception to the other and attempts to exclude the aspect of identity because of the presence of difference. Hegel admits both and their inconsistency as they appear here: the dialectic would stop at this point if the conception were genuinely self-consistent.
* ↑ For Dr. McTaggart’s view—a critical one—v. Commentary, chap. VII.
* ↑ ‘Thus the cause has an effect, and is itself effect; and the effect not only has a cause but is itself cause. But the effect which the cause has, and the effect which it is—like the cause which the effect has, and the cause which it is—are distinct’ (Larger Logic, WW. IV. pp. 234-5).
* ↑ The Realist critics of so-called internal relations seem to have some such reciprocal system as their target. In that case they can find good material for missiles in Hegel.
* ↑ The Data of Ethics, 3rd. edit. pp. 227-8.
* ↑ Cf. Phenomenology, WW. II. pp. 15-16.
* ↑ ‘When the notion has developed into such existence as is free, it is nothing else than the ego or pure self-consciousness. Of course, I have notions, i.e. determinate notions; but the ego is the pure notion itself, which, as such, has become a definite fact’ (WW. VI. pp. 13-14). Cf. Macran, Hegel's Doctrine of Formal Logic, p. 123.