McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic

26/John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart
so essential as this is correctly termed a postulate, which seems to denote
more properly a proposition which it would be at least possible for
an adversary to challenge. At any rate the very peculiar nature of the
assumption should be carefully remembered, as it affords a clue for
interpreting various expressions of Hegel’s, which might otherwise cause
serious difficulties. 21
20. Having thus endevoured to explain the nature of the dialectic,
we must ask ourselves at what results we are entitled to arrive by means
of that process. These results will be, to begin with, epistemological.
For the conditions of the dialectic are, first, the concrete notion, which
we are able to examine because it is implicit in all our consciousness,
and, second, the category of Being, which we are entitled to postulate,
because it is impossible to avoid employing it in judging experience.
Our conclusions will therefore relate primarily to the general laws of
experience, and will so far be, like those of Kant’s Aesthetic and Analytic,
concerned with the general conditions of human knowledge. And
the result arrived at will be that no category will satisfactorily explain
the universe except the Absolute Idea. Any attempt to employ for that
purpose a lower category must either accept a gradual transformation
of the idea employed until the Absolute Idea is reached, or acquiesce in
unreconciled contradictions—which involves the rejection of a fundamental
law of reason.
21. This position has two results. In the first place it disproves the
efforts which are made from time to time to explain the whole universe
by means of the lower categories only. Such an attempt lay at the bottom
of Hume’s scepticism, when he endeavoured to treat the notion of
causality as derived from that of sequence, and to consider all that was
added as false and illusive. For absolute scepticism is impossible, and
his treatment of the higher category as an unwarranted inference from
the lower involves the assertion of the validity of the latter. Such an
attempt, again, has been made by Mr Spencer, as well as by the large
number of writers who adopt the provisional assumptions of physical
science as an ultimate position. They endeavour to explain all phenomena
in terms of matter and motion, and to treat all special laws by which
they may be governed as merely particular cases of fundamental principles
taken from physical science.
But if we agree with Hegel in thinking that the category of Being is
inadequate to explain the world which we know without the successive
introduction of the categories, among others, of Cause, Life, and Self-