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.

    301/574 (page 221)
    while causality was the notion ; but that method it is proper to withckaw and change, now that reciprocity (in a notional form certainly) is the notion. This is a true insight into the most characteristic and obscure of all the very extraordinary procMes of Hegel. Wliile causality reigned, explanation consisted in assigning a reason for a consequent; that is, raisonnement was the method. Now, however, that reciprocity reigns, it is reciprocity that must guide, and constitute henceforth (till a new principle) the method of all theorising, and of all explanation. And this is simply what Hegel has performed : instead of accounting for this universe by a series of causes and effects, or reasons and conse- quents, he has simply carried his notional reciprocity, orderingly, arrangingly, into it, and presented it to us as a sphere of spheres, all of which follow notional reciprocity as their law and principle. What is said in regard to the relativity, or mode of relation which obtains in Substance as opposed to that which obtains in the Notion, is very important, and displays a most deep and unmistakable historical dye. On the stage of Substance, man, as his thought could only then show to him, was under Necessity ; and Ne- cessity constituted then the great subject of discussion : but here, on the stage of notional reciprocity, the prius of which exhibits itself as subjective or of the nature of thought, we are in an element of Freedo]ii, that element being thought or reason, which is but our inmost selves, and which to obey, then, is but to obey ourselves—is but Self-obedience, and that is Liberty. It is historical also, that he who first announced the notion of reciprocity, and in its subjective or notional form, was the same Kant who was the first to demon- strate, as if by exact proof, this fact of our Moral