process, arrest themselves and sist process into proceed or product; or Being and Nothing, now Origin and Decease, as but opposing directions of Becoming, arrest themselves, and sist Becoming into Become and that

is Daseyn, Here-being, There-being, So-being.

In the directest fashion, this is just the generalisation of what is before our eyes and between our fingers in other words, this is the thinking of the same; these are the thoughts which the commonest things involve: this, then, is Logic; why, then, should we not be content to take it thus? The generalisation of Aristotle, in regard to the abstract ultimates of ordinary reasoning, was not, we should say, one whit less strange, or one whit more satisfactory, when it emerged, than is now the generalisation of Hegel in regard to the ultimates of things. Things, in truth, have ultimate forms, as well as Thoughts, and it is good to know them all; nor is it to be supposed that less good will result from the ultimate thinking of Things than from the ultimate thinking of Thoughts. Nay, observe, in both cases, it is ultimate thinking; and as Thoughts and Things are all, this ultimate Thinking will not constitute only all ultimate Thinking, but it may go together systematically as a whole, and so constitute the ultimate and essential truth of the universe, or Philosophy at length! Again, Hegel is no less qualified for this abstraction here, than Aristotle was for that abstraction there; and these laconic paragraphs in regard to Nothing, Being, Becoming, and their process, may at once be held up in proof thereof. In every particular, the characterisation is consummate-the identification of the distinction we use as Being with the distinction we use as Nothing, the exhibition of each as process, the pointing out that process as Be

coming, the demonstrating Becoming to unite the distinctions at once as identical and as different in the opposing forms of Origin and Decease, and lastly, the precipitation of Becoming-by its own contradictioninto Become,- all is masterly, and there is present a dialectic which, as mere process, must wonderfully sharpen our wits. But it is not for a moment to be thought that it is as subjective discipline, and not as objective thinking, that this dialectic is valuable: on the contrary, the thoughts themselves must be seen to be the ultimate and essential thoughts that found, or ground, or beground the universe. Or so only can a beginning be thought; and so only, therefore, can a beginning be constituted.

A Beginning, in truth, or the Beginning, is what constitutes the bottom consideration here. To Hegel it is, no doubt, evident that it is utterly impossible to start with a single unit and conditions. Such a start were in its own crude presuppositions its own refutation. No material unit is competent to a material many; while to presuppose conditions for the production of this many, is just to presuppose this many itself. Before trying to find a beginning, we should have asked, what is a Beginning? What is the Category? this is the first question. It is absurd to talk of Conditions before we know what Conditions are. It is futile to explain the Beginning, unless we have first of all fairly seen into all that the Category, Beginning, implies. An Outward of any kind, for example, and a Beginning will be found absolutely incommensurable. In this way, as regards the object of our quest, we are shut in to the Inward-we are shut in to thought as thought, and the only possible conclusion is, that the thought of the beginning is just the beginning of thought. To

postulate a single substance exposed to a variety of conditions in a ready-made Time and Space, is just to take things as we see them-is just crudely to trip over crude figurate conceptions of the bottom categories, Identity and Difference, which should have been examined first. To talk of a primitive matter and conditions in explanation of transition, is to stultify oneself is to begin with the very variety which requires to be explained.

Again, it seems very difficult to think of a Beginning as only inward; we cannot think an inward without an outward as substrate and basis. We cannot conceive of thought as in the first instance just in the air. This is perfectly just. Thought is not thought just like so much water, held somewhere in the bag of the universe: Thought implies a thinking Subject. It may be that this Subject is not at first in ἐντελέχεια, or even in ἐνέργεια or μορφή; it may be that, at first, it is only in the stage duvaus, or that it is only potentially. Beginning, in fact, applied to such Subject must find it only potentially there, or only as indefinite immediacy : that is, the Subject itself, in the beginning, must find itself only in indefinite immediacy. Being is the first dim thought, which, when sought to be looked at closer, is only Nothing; but from this Nothing there is a return again to the sense of Being, which now, increased by the reflexion Nothing, can be conceived very intelligibly to contain the thoughts Becoming and Become. But this become is so far definite, it definitely is, and it becomes the Something of reflexion, and so on. In short, the whole process of the Logical Idea can have the universal Subject assigned to it as substrate. The reader is likely to find all this strange; but it is not a whit more strange than that pebble from

the brook, or this pen in my hand: we cannot blink the fact that there is existence, and that man's life has been to understand it. Very truly also that pebble from the brook is not an object just because it is a material something: all that constitutes what it essentially is to me, are categories, and what it is apart from these categories is as nothing: no object, even the most material, but is in very truth a congeries of thoughts. There is no absurdity, then, in the thought of the beginning as the beginning; for we must have confidence in thoughts and know them as the only verities when opposed to things.

It is on such universal and absolute considerations, then, that Hegel would rest his beginning and all his other procédés; and he does not, for a moment think it necessary to allude to the manner in which he gradually worked himself into light on the stand-point and with the materials of Kant. One word in reference to that the actual and concrete origin will not be out of place, just to reassure ourselves of the mundane connexions and really external nature of Hegel's operations, however esoteric be their issue, and however absolute their truth. It is hardly necessary, probably, to remind the reader that Hegel, adopting the hint of Kant, and taking in his hands both the Ontological manuals and Kant's own materials, could hardly fail to observe that Seyn was the genus summum, Nichts the differentia summa, and Werden the species summa. As little reason either is there for reminder that Hegel, realising Logic, recognised in the three steps just named but three forms of the three moments of the single Logical heart-beat common to the Universe, or that, vitalising History, his attention was specially directed to that Notion of Reciprocity which connected him with Kant. Let us just point out in passing,

however, that the three numbers under Werden refer to the same considerations. Thus, No. 1 is the unity of Being and Nothing,' which is the Begriff, or the moment of Simple Apprehension; No. 2 is the moments of Becoming-or manifestly the Ur-theil; and No. 3, theSublation of Becoming,' is a movement of Schluss or an act of Reason. The reciprocity of opposing moments with mutual eclipse in a common sphere (in analogy with Kant's mode of viewing the disjunctive judgment) is also obvious. We are not for a moment to suppose, then, that the Logical series of Hegel really rests on absolute considerations, or really flows absolutely from an internal pulse: the veritably genetic considerations and pulse of Hegel are certainly, for the most part, relative and external. I know not whether the problem ever presented itself to Hegel in the brief propos, We have to identify Affection with Function; but what that phrase implies lies not obscurely at the centre of his whole industry. If the reader will but take the trouble to reflect on the problem as thus expressed, he will realise to himself the nature and course of the necessarily first thoughts of Hegel. His first difficulty, for example, will be the formality of the problem as announced, and the necessity for matter. What is Function-what is Affection? Thinking is function-yes-and feeling is affection; but how get them together-where shall we begin-how shall we begin? The Logical movement is function; but Simple Apprehension and the rest are quite formal-how are we to realise them? There seems no possibility of a transition from the one to the other. In the midst of such thoughts as these, it certainly would be a relief to recur to the Categories, and to observe in these a sort of middle-ground between affection and function-media,