McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic

36/John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart
experience. In this way the sterility of pure thought was conquered, but
with it the cogency of this dialectic process also disappeared, and it
became merely empirical and contingent, without a claim to be called
philosophy.
On the question as to the actual results of the dialectic we shall
consider Trendelenburg’s views further on. As to Hegel’s intention, he
says “Although the Wissenschaftslehre of Fichte extracted the Non-Ego
from the Ego, yet he does not go on to real notions. The dialectic has
appropriated his methods; it takes the same course in position, opposition,
and reconciliation. It does not make so much difference that it
begins with the notion of Being, for it is the empty image of Being. If it
nevertheless comes to the notions of reality and to concrete forms, we
do not perceive whence it gets to them. For pure thought will not accept
them, and then permeate them, but endeavours to make them. Thought,
expressed in this way, is born blind and has no eyes towards the outside.”
25
32. In answer to this we may quote Mr F. H. Bradley. “An idea
prevails that the Dialectic Method is a sort of experiment with conceptions
in vacuo. We are supposed to have nothing but one single isolated
abstract idea, and this solitary monad then proceeds to multiply by
gemmation from or by fission of its private substance, or by fetching
matter from the impalpable void. But this is a mere caricature, and it
comes from confusion between that which the mind has got before it and
that which it has within itself. Before the mind there is a single conception,
but the mind itself, which does not appear, engages in the process,
operates on the datum, and produces the result. The opposition between
the real, in the fragmentary character in which the mind possesses it,
and the true reality felt within the mind, is the moving cause of that
unrest which sets up the dialectical process.” 26
The fact seems to be that Trendelenburg’s interpretation of Hegel’s
attempt to construct a dialectic of pure thought, is inadequate in two
ways. He supposes, first, that the incomplete thought from which we
start is conceived to exist only in its incompleteness, and is intended to
have as yet no actual relation to the concrete reality to which it is afterwards
to attain. In fact, he says, the process does depend on a reference
to concrete reality, but, in so far as this is so, the original attempt, which
was to construct an objectively valid dialectic by means of pure thought,
has broken down. I shall try, however, to show that such a relation to
reality was in Hegel’s mind throughout, and that it leads to conclusions