Hugh Adam Reyburn

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”