QUANTITY INTERPRETED, ETC.

LIBRARY

UNIVE

pure Notion. What is, is now pure Quantity/sublated

Quality, Determinateness external to its own self, an in- ITY OF

IA.

definitely continuous outering or uttering of itself of the
One as One, One, One; but it is the pure Notion that.
is so characterised, and whatever is implicit in this cha-
racterisation, that notion shall duly set or make explicit
for us. Now One,-and One, One, One,—and again One
that, referring back, resumes these one-one-ones, is very
fairly the movement of the notion in such an element.
Not only is such movement characteristic of the element
as element, but on the other side, it is the characteristic
movement of the Notion itself;-it is again Apprehen-
sion, Judgment, and Reason; it is again Identity, Differ-
ence, and identified Difference, or differentiated Identity;
it is again Immediacy, Mediacy, and re-mediated Im-
mediacy, or just Immediate Mediacy. This being seen,
another deep glance into Hegel has been effected with
realisation of the distinction that Hegel is not only true
to the principle, the Notion, but true to the element
also; and so only is it that what he says is the exhaus-
tive Metaphysic, even in an external sense, of whatever
sphere he enters. A great deal has been written about
Cause and Effect, for example, but it will be found that
Hegel alone, with vigilant eye immovably fixed on the
pure Notion, has been enabled to speak the ultimate
word, even as external explanation, on this subject also.
The number Ten, then, illustrates, but it does not
create the present phase of the Absolute or of the
Notion; that phase is one of pure Quantity, and is
applicable not to numbers only, but to extension as
well. There are many readers to whom all this pro-
secution of a one, one, one, &c., will appear but trifling
-a trifling wholly unworthy of grown men even so,
to an external eye, a bearded Archimedes scratching

lines, triangles, squares, circles, &c., might seem but a great boy very unworthily employing himself. Archimedes, however, through these scratches brought no less a power than that of Rome to bay; through these scratches Archimedes and the like enabled us to move mountains and to change seas, enabled us to seize Space and Time themselves: these scratches, indeed, have been to us the express successive steps heavenwards. So Hegel, following these soap-bubbles of one, one, one, &c., has made us freemen of the Absolute itself.

6

The tenth of the ten will be found to illustrate the first sentence of the second paragraph also; it is referred to the unity '-Ten; it is negation in this unity; it stops Ten there, and it stops others off from Ten; it is also 'referred to itself,'—it is the tenth, and so each of the others is a tenth, and the ten itself has in it (the tenth) its own particular value or virtue; and thus is it encompassing and containing limit.' The ten to follow the next sentence are thus in the tenth, the limit, this negative point itself'; the tenth, then, is thus not distinguished from the Something, the Ten. Still the Ten are a Being-essentially continuity-a Ten-beyond this limit,' this single One, the tenth, and in that respect indifferent to it.' It is thus a Quantity, and a Something with a specific Thereness or peculiar nature.

The last paragraph opens with renewed consideration of the tenth unit of the ten; as it is it which gives the whole peculiar character of the number-a ten— it is the qualitative and quantitative limit; quantitatively it limits the continuity; qualitatively it absorbs into itself all the other units-each is a tenth, but only through it; it is thus limit in the continuity generally, limit to the continuity as such, and limit also, as it

were, to the continuity of the discretes themselves (in that it sums and absorbs them). Thus is it that — (the tenth unit sublating, absorbing, or taking up into itself both)—' continuous and discrete magnitude is here indifferent,' or that both undergo transition into Quanta,' the discretes becoming each a tenth and so in continuity Ten- through the limiting tenth.

The reader will find the illustration here a very perfect key to a very blank door indeed of indefinite abstraction. Nevertheless, it is always to the Absolute that the reader must first address himself; only so will he find himself at home also, if we may speak thus, with soap, soda, and pearl-ash.

What is explicit now is Quantity as such-whether discrete or continuous-reduced to Limit,-let us well observe this.

CHAPTER II.

QUANTUM.

THE Quantum, first of all Quantity with a Determinateness or Limit in general,-is in its perfect Determinateness the Number (the Digit or Cipher). The Quantum distinguishes itself

'secondly, in the first instance, into the extensive Quantum, in which the Limit is as limitation of the there-beënt multiplex (or Many); in the second instance, (this There-being passing into Being-for-self)— into intensive Quantum, Degree, which, as for-itself, and even so no less immediately out of itself, seeing that it is as indifferent Limit even when for-itself,-has its Determinateness in another. As this express contradiction, to be thus simply determined within itself and at the same time to have its determinateness out of itself, and to point for this determinateness out of itself, the Quantum passes over

'thirdly, as what is expressly in itself external to itself, into the Quantitative Infinite.'

If not intelligible now, this division will become intelligible by the end of the chapter. The Many, the Multiplex, the Ones, or Units of extensive Quanta, are evidently there-beënt; they are not ansich; they are distinguishably there; they are relative distinctivity there; they are palpably there-sensibly there; and they are what they are through negation of Becoming, Limit.

A.

THE NUMBER OR DIGIT.

Quantity is Quantum, or has a limit; both as continuous and as discrete magnitude. The difference of these kinds has here at first hand no import.'

This has just been seen the limit of the continuum is the limit also of, or affects with its own virtue, the discreta.

As sublated Being-for-self, Quantity is already in and for itself indifferent to its limit. But withal the limit, or to be a Quantum, is just so not indifferent to it; for it contains the One, absolute determinedness, within itself as its own moment, which One, therefore, as explicit in its continuity or unity, is its limit, which, however, remains as One, as which One it (the Quantity) now on the whole is.'

This is intelligible when viewed sub specie æterni, and also when illustrated as before by ten, &c. Sublated Being-for-self is, as it were, punctuality gone over out of itself into its own opposite, and that is Quantity.

This One is, therefore, the principle and principium of the Quantum, but as One of Quantity. So it is, firstly, Continuous, it is oneness or unity; secondly, it is Discrete, implicit (as in continuous) or (as in discrete magnitude) explicit Multiplicity of Ones, which have equality, likeness, sameness, continuity, the same oneness or unity with one another; thirdly, this One is also the negation of the Many Ones as simple limit, an exclusion of its otherwiseness out of itself, a determination of itself counter other Quanta. The One is so far, (a) limit referent of self to self, (B) self-comprehensive limit, and (7) other-excluding limit.'