McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic

22/John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart
enable it to claim universal validity for its conclusions, it is certain that
it will be necessary for thought, in the dialectic process, to have some
relation to data given immediately, and independent of that thought itself.
Even if the dialectic should finally transcend this condition it would
have at starting to take thought as we use it in every-day life—as merely
mediating, and not self-subsistent. And I shall try to show later on that
it never does transcend, or try to transcend that limitation. 18
On the other hand it is no less true that any argument would be
incapable of leading us to general conclusions relating to pure thought,
which was based on the nature of any particular piece of experience in
its particularity, and that, whatever reference to experience Hegel may
or may not have admitted into his system, his language is conclusive
against the possibility that he has admitted any empirical or contingent
basis to the dialectic.
15. The two conditions can, however, be reconciled. There is a sense
in which conclusions relating to pure thought may properly be based on
an observation of experience, and in this sense, as I believe, we must
take the Logic in order to arrive at Hegel’s true meaning. According to
this view, what is observed is the spontaneous and unconditioned movement
of the pure notion, which does not in any way depend on the matter
of intuition for its validity, which, on the contrary, is derived from the
character of the pure reason itself. But the process, although independent
of the matter of intuition, can only be perceived when the pure
notion is taken in conjunction with matter of intuition—that is to say
when it is taken in experience—because it is impossible for us to grasp
thought in absolute purity, or except as applied to an immediate datum.
Since we cannot observe pure thought at all, except in experience, it is
clear that it is only in experience that we can observe the change from
the less to the more adequate form which thought undergoes in the dialectic
process. But this change of form is due to the nature of thought
alone, and not to the other element in experience—the matter of intuition.
19
The presence of this other element in experience is thus a condition
of our perceiving the dialectical movement of pure thought. We may go
further. It does not follow, from the fact that the movement is due to the
nature of pure thought alone, that pure thought can ever exist, or ever be
imagined to exist, by itself. We may regard pure thought as a mere
abstraction of one side of experience, which is the only concrete reality,
while the matter of intuition is an abstraction of the other side of the