[5] His usual term is Denkbestimmungen, the several expressions or specific forms of the unification which thought is. The term Categories has been identified by Kant with his list of Stammbegriffe. and by Mill with his classes of nameable things,—with some critical remarks on Aristotle's use of the word. That use—to denote the elements of predicable reality, what Grote called ens—is probably not so 'rhapsodical' as Kant, with his new-born zeal for the contrast of sensibility and intellect, was inclined to suppose. A real history of the Category-theory would be almost a history of philosophy. Perhaps the name might be more sparingly used.
[6] Generalisation is only one small aspect of thought, with specialisation as its, at least as important, pendant. To read certain logics, one might think the all-comprehensive virtue of truths were to be general,—not to be true.
[7] ὅν and μὴ ὅν: τὸ γιγνόμενον: τὸ ἐξ οὗ: τὸ οὗ ἕνεκα: τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι: τὸ τί ἐστι: θάτερον: ἕν: τὸ μέγα καὶ τὸ μικρόν: τὸ καθ' ὅλου: τὸ καθ' ἔκαστον: τόδε τί.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE THREE PARTS OF LOGIC.
Logic, as it is understood in these pages, is the critical history of the terms of thought by which reality, the sum of experience, the world, is described or expressed. It is the philosophical criticism of the concepts, or elements of conception, by which we define or develop the Totality, the Absolute. It describes the constitution of the intellectual realm, by and in which we give body, coherence, unity, and system to reality. It is the self-developing organisation of the thoughts by which we think things, and by which things are what they are. It is the ripe fruit of the experience of the ages of humanity, and it therefore bears in itself a principle of growth. But if it be a fruit, it is a fruit which can watch its own growth, which reflects upon its own life. Its three parts show the main stages of its development, beginning with the least adequate and most abstract or general description of reality.
The first part of Logic, the theory of Being[1], may be called the theory of unsupported and freely-floating Being. We do not mean something which is, but the mere 'is,' the bare fact of Being, without any substratum. The degree of condensation or development, where substantive and attribute, or noun and verb, co-exist, has not yet come. The terms or forms of Being float as it were freely in the air, and we go from one to another, or—to put it more correctly—one passes into another. The terms in question are Is and Not: Become: There is: Some and Other: Each: One: Many: and so on through the terms of number to degree and numerical specificality. This Being is immediate: i.e. it contains no reference binding it with anything beyond itself, but stands forward baldly and nakedly, as if alone; and, if hard pressed, it turns over into something else. It includes the three stages of Quality, Quantity, and Measure. The ether of 'Is' presumes no substratum, or further connexion with anything: and we only meet a series of points as we travel along the surface of thought. To name, to number, to measure, are the three grades of our ordinary and natural thought: so simple, that one is scarcely disposed to look upon them as grades of thought at all. And yet if thought is self-specification, what more obvious forms of specifying it are there than to name (so pointing it out, or qualifying it), to number (so quantifying it, or stating its dimensions), and to measure it? These are the three primary specificates by which we think,—the three primary dimensions of thought. Thought, in so determining, plays upon the surface, and has no sense of the interdependence of its terms. And if we could imagine a natural state of consciousness in which sensations had not yet hardened into permanent things, and into connexions between things, we should have something like the range of Immediate Being. Colours and sounds, a series of floating qualities, pass before the eye and the ear: these colours and sounds are in course of time counted: and then, by applying the numbers to these qualities, we get the proportions or limits ascertained. When this process in actual life,—the advance from the vague feelings which tell us of sweet, cold, &c., by means of a definite enumeration of their phenomena, to the rules guiding their operation,—is reduced to its most abstract terms, we have the process of Being. It would be the period when a distinction between things and their actions or properties has not arisen. The demonstrative pronouns and the numerals are among the linguistic expressions of Being in its several stages. Perhaps too we may illustrate it by the so-called 'impersonal' verb—which has hardly reached the stage of verb proper, having no subject: or by the name which still fluctuates between the stage of substantive or adjective.
The first sphere was that of Being directly confronting us, and using the demonstrative pronouns first of all. The second is Relative or Reflective Being: and in this we have to deal with the relative pronouns. The surface of Being is now seen to exhibit a secondary formation, to involve a sort of permanent standard in itself, and to be essentially relative. The mere quality, when reduced to number, is seen to be subjected to a certain measure, rule, sort, or standard: and this reflex of itself always haunts it, modifying and determining it. Thus instead of qualities, we begin to speak of the properties of a thing: we have, as it were, two levels of Being, in intimate and necessary connexion, where there was only one before. At first it was but a mere surface-picture, one thing here and another there: a this and a that; one, now, and another, then. This, it might be, was round, and that square: now, it was bright, and then, it was dull: here was a head, and there was a limb. But the comparison of quality with quantity, measuring one by the other, gave rise to the conception of something permanent, a true nucleus amid the changes. The fact, previously single, is now become double: the mere event is now a phenomenon, a temporary and outward manifestation of something inner. We now see each that is, in the halo of what it has been, or will be: the passing modification in the light of the permanent type. But as yet the permanent and the passing are separate, and only throw light on each other: A explaining itself by B and B by A. We have apparently two facts; neither of which can however stand by itself and therefore refers us to the other. But to get a real rest in this incessant round of mutual reference of one to another we must take a higher stand-point.