The Logic of Hegel. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

      THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC.

      CHAPTER I.

      Introduction 3

      CHAPTER II.

      Preliminary Notion 30

      CHAPTER III.

      First Attitude of Thought to Objectivity 60

      CHAPTER IV.

      Second Attitude of Thought to Objectivity:—

       I. Empiricism 76 II. The Critical Philosophy 82

      CHAPTER V.

      Third Attitude of Thought to Objectivity:—

       Immediate or Intuitive Knowledge 121

      CHAPTER VI.

      Logic Further Defined and Divided 143

      CHAPTER VII.

      First Subdivision of Logic:—

       The Doctrine of Being 156

      CHAPTER VIII.

      Second Subdivision of Logic:— The Doctrine of Essence 207

      CHAPTER IX.

      Third Subdivision of Logic:— The Doctrine of the Notion 287

      NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

      ON CHAPTER

      INDEX433

      BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE

      ON THE THREE EDITIONS AND THREE PREFACES OF THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA

      The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline is the third in time of the four works which Hegel published. It was preceded by the Phenomenology of Spirit, in 1807, and the Science of Logic (in two volumes), in 1812–16, and was followed by the Outlines of the Philosophy of Law in 1820. The only other works which came directly from his hand are a few essays, addresses, and reviews. The earliest of these appeared in the Critical Journal of Philosophy, issued by his friend Schelling and himself, in 1802—when Hegel was one and thirty, which, as Bacon thought, 'is a great deal of sand in the hour-glass'; and the latest were his contributions to the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik, in the year of his death (1831).

      This Encyclopaedia is the only complete, matured, and authentic statement of Hegel's philosophical system. But, as the title-page bears, it is only an outline; and its primary aim is to supply a manual for the guidance of his students. In its mode of exposition the free flight of speculation is subordinated to the needs of the professorial class-room. Pegasus is put in harness. Paragraphs concise in form and saturated with meaning postulate and presuppose the presiding spirit of the lecturer to fuse them into continuity and raise them to higher lucidity. Yet in two directions the works of Hegel furnish a supplement to the defects of the Encyclopaedia.

One of these aids to comprehension is the Phenomenology of Spirit, published in his thirty-seventh year. It may be going too far to say with David Strauss that it is the Alpha and Omega of Hegel, and his later writings only extracts from it.[1] Yet here the Pegasus of mind soars free through untrodden fields of air, and tastes the joys of first love and the pride of fresh discovery in the quest for truth. The fire of young enthusiasm has not yet been forced to hide itself and smoulder away in apparent calm. The mood is Olympian—far above the turmoil and bitterness of lower earth, free from the bursts of temper which emerge later, when the thinker has to mingle in the fray and endure the shafts of controversy. But the Phenomenology, if not less than the Encyclopaedia it contains the diamond purity of Hegelianism, is a key which needs consummate patience and skill to use with advantage. If it commands a larger view, it demands a stronger wing of him who would join its voyage through the atmosphere of thought up to its purest empyrean. It may be the royal road to the Idea, but only a kingly soul can retrace its course.

      The other commentary on the Encyclopaedia is supplied partly by Hegel's other published writings, and partly by the volumes (IX-XV in the Collected works) in which his editors have given