Volume 1

The secret of Hegel : being the Hegelian system in origin, principle, form, and matter / by James Hutchison Stirling.

Date:
1865
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The secret of Hegel : being the Hegelian system in origin, principle, form, and matter / by James Hutchison Stirling. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    288/574 (page 208)
    TllK SliCllHT OF HEGEL. a flight of tliree, tlie kist of wliicli is always a return to the first, but clianged, as if it were richer, heavier, more complete—more completely developed, in fact. Eacli of the three terms concerned must be conceived to begin, to fill, to reach its full; and when full, to show, as it were, the germ of its opposite, which rising u]) into its full, seeks union and coalescence with its former to a new production. This is the one metaphor of the thought of Hegel; and even here we can see that Ave have never moved from the spot; for this metaplior is but another way of expressing the one movement or principle already characterised in so many ways as ^ovaaig, uAtj, ivrsXe^sia; Begriff, TJrtheil, Schluss ; Uni- versality, Particularity, Singularity ; Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis ; Being, Essence, Notion, &c. &c. Wlierever we are, in Hegel indeed we have ever tlie same triplet before us in one or other of its innumerable forms. Always there are the two. opposites or reciprocals which coalesce hke acid and alkah to a base—a base in which they still implicitly are, but only as moments. This base, again, if the result of its moments, is really their base, their ground, their foundation, their Grund- lage. If they found it, it founds them. It is the mother-liquor into which they have passed: it is a living base out of which they can arise and show themselves, and into which they can again disappearingly return. This is the Hegelian metaphor : a ground, a base, from which arise members, which again withdraw them- selves—a differentiated Common or One. And what is this but the disjunctive or reciprocal whole of Kant, suggested to him by the disjunctive judgment, and dis- cussed by him at so much length, and with such fresh, new, and creative vigour ? A sphere of reciprocity: this is the whole. This is the Hegelian Idee-Monad.