have called to Self-interest to brand his consuming mark into them. Nor is it otherwise with the spiritual side: self-interest, being allowed the right, has seized it too, and made it material. Whatever is spiritual nowadays is, just as whatever is material,— a commodity. But look to the result-a universal revolt of the Will of the Unit against the Will of the One! The best proof of this state of the fact lies in this-that each one sees and censures this condition of things in others, and is absolutely blind to it in himself. The very Mistress, for example, who shall this moment be loud against the revolt of domestic servants, shall, the next, be equally loud for the revolt of the sex. The injustice to woman commences at her birth: the parents regret to find her not a boy!'-Are we always, then, to abstract the Difference and turn against it? Nay, at the very moment that we turn against the Difference, as but a Relative, as not the Absolute-at that very moment is it not the longing of our whole soul actually to make absolute this very Difference? This we, this atom we call we, is a very good atom and the very best of atoms, make it immortal and absolute by all means; but the Difference! is our atom but the Difference, and is it only against our atom we turn when we turn against the Difference? Yes, it is even so; we do but abstract our own Difference and turn upon it; and another Menenius were very acceptable now to persuade us again into the identity- but the differentiated identity ―of the concrete. The social Atomism which sapped and dissipated Rome, the mightiest empire that time had ever seen, was animal enough; but what we witness now is baser. The coldest, shallowest, meanest, every way the most miserable Atomism of which universal history can speak, is Commercial Atomism,

chester.

Politico-Economical Atomism, the Atomism of ManAnd in this Atomism, the very arrangement which it demands as best, is it, let us say even the superior atom, so very much at its ease? Rebuked— however superior it may be-by yet a superior superiority, on 'change, in the street, at church, in its newspaper, it retires from the misery of the day to that solitary evening hour-solitary, but alone the rose of life to it-when, gnawing at still a difficulty, and, not yet enough, and comparing the ash of the present with the live-coal of the past, it once again admires the vanity of vanities, and bitterly mellows itself towards the oblivion and the Elysium of an eight hours' sleep!

But there is more here than an exposure of Atomism -- Immortality itself is here! The pure notion hasin purity-followed its own movement, its own native dialectic: the One is Many, and the Many One; the Differences are in Identity, and Identity is in the Differences. It is impossible fully to expose to a reader all the burthen of these wonderful paragraphs: each is but a water-drop, that and nothing more; but to him that looks into it, it radiates into that which is.

"Each is excluding the others,' sounds not quite satisfactorily; still it is literal and intelligible.

b. The one One of Attraction.

This section is sufficiently exoteric to require no comment. Towards the end, the German word which is translated Extension is Umfang: now Umfang is opposed to Inhalt, as logical Extension to logical Comprehension; but here, nevertheless, something of its literal meaning, its fang um, its grasp about, is also to be seen.

6

The reader ought not to fail to see here, however, the divine sense, how all is sub specie æterni; and, indeed, it ought to be matter of wonder to him, how a simple prosecution of the pure notion should be able to lead to such concrete Wisdom-the peace of reconciliation, the establishment of all those great religious truths which, at least lately, have had the character rather of aspirations than of known facts. Clues to the attitude indicated may be attempted to be conveyed thus: In the first paragraph of the preceding Section (a), what is the full force of that exhibited Contradiction, Infinitude ex-pressed into Immediacy of Being;' or in the last paragraph, same Section, what is the full force of that going-together-with-Self?' The reflexion must be seen to be double: if a consciousness goes together with its own self, it has certainly its own self inwardly; but in going together with its own self, it has also gone together with its own self outwardly; the contracting inwardly into its own abstract negativity is a proportional dilating outwardly into its own self as the differences, its differences, the Objects, the seen outward concrete. Thus doubly is it a going together with its own self; and thus is it the Dis-played Contra-diction-Infinitude unfolded into the Immediacy of Being. Here again, under (b), the full force of the one One that is the realised Ideality must not be missed. In a word, he who has an eye to see may know how to discern himself henceforth secure in the Finite Infinite, the Relative Absolute, with God assured to him, Immortality assured to him, Free-will assured to him, -and all this by virtue of the simple Notion.

c. The Reference of Repulsion and Attraction. Beziehung, the German word for Reference, has a

stronger sense than its English counterpart, amounting to a be-drawing, as it were a drawing together, and almost equivalent to connexion. What we have here, then, are Repulsion and Attraction in mutual connexion; and by these words we are to understand, not a merely physical Repulsion and Attraction, but a Metaphysical also, -a repulsion and attraction sub specie æterni, in the realm of thought, in the world of Spirits.

The apparent immediacy of the Repulsion, to the foundation of the self-dependent Ones, with the apparent -in the first instance-externality of the Attraction, is the first point; and to what all this in rerum natura is directed must now be evident. Both, then, appear, in the first instance, as abstract, as per se.

Repulsion, thus alone, would be simply the irretrievable dissipation of the Ones. But thus, again, the Ones were not, as they are determined to be, repellent, excludent. The Repulsion still implies Reference; what excludes is still in liaison with that which is excluded. But this is Attraction; repulsion itself implies Attraction. Abstract Repulsion, and Beënts only self-referent, are thus negated.

Repulsion and Attraction, then, at first view independent, are, in effect, mutually presuppositious, the one of the other.

Each has precisely the same constitution; each is the other; and each is so, not through the other, but through itself.

They are so while merely relative.

The implication of Repulsion and the Ones is again made prominent.

Attraction is similarly gone into; and its implication of Many, even while it would set ideality or the One,

made equally evident. This, in fact, is the true Metaphysic of the necessity of Thought, i. e. of Existence, that there should be at once and both One and Many : so some of the weightiest of human interests are thus brought to a settlement.

Each negates itself and sets itself as the other, and the other of itself. The Attraction of the There-beënt units is their ideality, the setting of the One. But in the One, Attraction just sublates itself. To set a One is to be the negative of itself, that is, Repulsion.—The thoughts here are sufficiently fine; but they are also sufficiently obvious, and sufficiently fact. The words are few and abstract; but if they be gazed into, and in the proper mood of mind, they will expand to the concrete and that, too, with resolution of the most fundamental problems of existence.

'But not only is the In itself as such long since gone over into the Being-for-Self:' we are to consider that the development has advanced, and, moreover, that this development is actuality, and not mere expression of a book.

For this concluding paragraph of Being-for-Self, in which Quality, completed, passes over into its opposite, Quantity, let us avail ourselves again of our metaphor, the Voice; but let us conceive this time that it is a conscious Voice. Well, this Voice is a One that repels from itself its own self (in its Determination, its Notification) as its absolute (i. e. abstract) Otherwisenéss (the Many). Its series of Notes is just its absolute otherwiseness; but also its abstract otherwiseness, in that it is abstractly looked at, and not, in that reference, identified with itself. But in that it refers itself to this sequent Notification, negatively, or as to its Non-being, it sublates it, it refers itself in it only to