mainly due to the negative element: it is the dark gives colour and distinction in colour. Not very different is it in the case of a flavour; the peculiarity of it, the difference of it, is the edge, and seems apart from the body of the flavour: when it is all peculiarity or edge, it is thin, worthless, or passes into Nothing. (One meets characters who are all edge, distinction, emphasis, accent; they cut, but they do not move: the fair union makes the great man, as Homer, Sophocles, Epaminondas, Cervantes, &c.) Sound is much the same; it is determination by silence that produces musical notes: possibly, varying proportions of vibration and non-vibration constitute much of the difference in sounds. Colour, in like manner, may result, not, as in the coarse theory of Goethe, from a mecha nical mixture of light and darkness, but from variety in the alternation of vibration and non-vibration (undulation offers no difference to make a difficulty). It is remarkable, too, that there are seven musical notes and seven colours; and if the latter be really reducible to three, is such reduction applicable to the former? Are colours but music to the eye- music but colours to the ear? Perhaps, variety in odours and flavours similarly arises, and all difference is but alternation of vibration and non-vibration. Thus, too, may neutral effects be accounted for, as the black of the union of iron and gallic acid in ink. Non-being, then, is the seat of determination, the edge of difference - how else is edge conceivable but as cessation? Edge here, too, is but another word for the smack, the pitch, the feel. In this way we can see difference in identity almost as a matter of fact. We can conceive what is as the one identical, infinitesimal spore whose vibration is its difference-and that is the all of thought

as exhibited. Hegel's general view must be capable of being so stated. What is the universe to him, if not the one absolute vor inflecting itself into its involved voculations? Bestimmung is but articulation, and the absolute Bestimmung is but the absolute articulation of the absolute one- and that one is just Thought Thought's own native articulations constitute the All of Things.-The above remarks, it is to be understood, however, are not to be regarded materially, or in themselves, but only formally and relatively, as illustrative of the union of Being and Nothing in every There-being.

c. Something.

The reader ought to pay particular attention to this section, for it is the most important we have yet seen, both in itself and as illustrative of the thinking peculiar to Hegel. We may notice, in the first place, what is spoken of as the Unterschied, the inter-shed, the distinction, the difference, which in There-being appears as Reality and Negation. It is the same difference which was first named Being and Nothing, then Origin and Decease, and now as here. Being and Nothing collapsed, or were eclipsed, into the concrete neutral base, Becoming; There-being assumed a like relation to Origin and Deccase; and now we see Something similarly to resume Reality and Negation. Thus, then, we see Logical Determination verily in process: the moments have successively thickened themselves, and the base (which is just also a moment) has likewise successively thickened itself. Now, the means productive of this thickening has been simply Reflexion, or indeed just— Thinking: the one moment of the single logical rhyth

mus passes into its opposite, and with it collapses into a higher third: this is Hegel's Dialectic; but it is also Simple Apprehension, Judgment, and Reason; or it is Begriff, Urtheil, Schluss; or, again, it is an, poppin, EVTEXÉXEα, An sich, für sich, &c. &c.*

What we have to see here, however, is, that the Difference exists, and that it is always, in whatever form, still the Difference,- an antithesis and at the same time synthesis of two such, that the one is only because the other is, and both collapse into a Third. The reader must bear in mind the inter-shed, then, as the primordial, but ever-present and vital, Diæresis or Diaphora of the world: Yes No - Both!

The single pivot of this section, however, finds itself in the phrases first and second negation, the negation of the negation, the concrete absolute negation, resolution of difference, sublation of distinction, the negative reference of self to self, the negative unity of self with self, the Mediation of self with self, Being-within-Self, &c.; all of which just mean the same thing, and that is, the negation of the constituting Variety, or Many into the constituted Unit or One, or the absorption of the Parts into the Whole, said Whole being further regarded as simply Singular. In Something, in short, There-being just sublates its own difference, or it returns to itself from its own difference, and is thus gone into itself. If anyone will consider what a Subject is, he will readily understand this: an Ego or I is the unity of an infinitude of details, but as Ego it is wholly negative, as Ego all its details have disappeared; Ego is,

Perhaps it is confusing to call this movement Reflexion, as Hegel reserves that term for only one of its contained moments--that of the separating and abstracting under

standing or judgment: an instance of this occurs in this very paragraph, in an allusion to unformed Reflexion.

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therefore, the negative unity of itself with itself, or the mediation of itself with itself; and thus is it the negation of the negation, for its details are in the first instance as negative to it, (the abstract negative is here involved, productive of variety or difference,) but it as return to itself is the negation of the negation, and the resumption of concrete unity. The two negatives or negations are thus, then, very clear; and Something as negation of the negation is seen to be the beginning of the Subject. The words in the text, There-being in general, Distinction in it, and resolution of this Distinction,' contain the whole business. In these words, too, the moments come completely to the surface: There-being in general' is the Immediacy of the Begriff, the An sich, or the moment of Simple Apprehension; Distinction in it' is the Mediacy of the Ur-theil, or the moment of Judgment; and resolution of this distinction' is, as Schluss or resuming Totality, the moment of Reason. In him who shall understand this section, the lesson of Hegel has fairly begun. Every way the thinking here is admirable: consider the pointing out, though that is an anticipation, and Something has first of all to other itself in itself, that Something, as in itself Becoming, goes asunder into the concrete Werden that has Something and Other as its sides, both of which are Somethings.

6

The reader will get a glimpse of the negative reference to self, if he will conceive his finger running questioningly over an unknown surface, and suddenly returning from the edge of the same back, as it were, to its centre with the word wood, or stone, or glass, &c., as the case may be. Let him suppose himself to be blindfolded, and successive surfaces to be tenta

tively offered to one finger, and he will find that he is in contact for some time simply with an unknown blur of difference, which blur suddenly collapses to a unityand to a unity of self-reference-when what it is and that is its notion-suddenly strikes him. Then only when it attains self-reference is the blur - Something. Hegel's Metaphysic of Something, then,— and it is perfect, for no Something in the Universe but will be found to be accurately constituted so,-is but a concrete act of Perception as Perception was determined by Kant. Consider what an unknown blur the Santa Maria must have proved to the Indians who watched with appalled astonishment those bright shapes, Columbus and the harnessed Spaniards, descending from it; and consider, again, the easy unity of self-reference in which it would have all gone together as ship' to the eyes of any European sailor, had any such, by shipwreck or otherwise, found himself among them! All this refers to Kant's theory of perception-a theory which, as stated at full elsewhere * in its own place, shall only be alluded to here. This theory, we may observe, Hegel has undoubtedly made his own; but we know of no evidence at present that anyone has previously recognised its presence and creative activity in him, nor, indeed, that any but Hegel has recognised it in Kant even. Now that it is pointed out, however, it is quite likely that it will be found in many words which never yielded it, and of many people who never thought of it before. In Kant's theory of Perception, then, there are three moments: there is, first, the manifold of Sense; second, the synthetic unity of the Category; and third, the Apperception of the individual subject.

VOL. II.

This, again, is but the Notion of

* In another work.

H