McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic

38/John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart
doubt the case that, as Hegel mentions in Section 8, philosophy has
“another circle of objects, which” empirical knowledge “does not embrace.
These are Freedom, Mind, and God.” But, although philosophy
deals with these conceptions, it does so, according to Hegel, only by
starting from empirical knowledge. It is, for example, only by the contemplation
of the finite objects perceived by the senses that we arrive at
the knowledge of God. 29 And, as we are now considering the basis, and
not the extent, of philosophy, the fact that we can rise to knowledge of
that which is never represented in sensuous intuition is not to the point.
34. Again, in Section 9, he points out that “the method of empirical
science exhibits two defects. The first is that the Universal, or general
principle contained in it, the genus or kind, etc., is of its own nature
indeterminate and vague, and therefore not on its own account connected
with the particular or the details. Either is external and accidental
to the other, and it is the same with the particular facts which are
brought into union: each is external and accidental to the others. The
second defect is that the beginnings are in every case data and postulates,
neither accounted for nor deduced. In both these points the form
of necessity fails to get its due. Hence reflection, whenever it sets itself
to remedy these defects, becomes speculative thinking, the thinking proper
to philosophy.” Further on in the same section he says that “the relation
of speculative science to the other sciences may be stated in the following
terms. It does not in the least neglect the empirical facts contained in
the other sciences but recognises and adopts them: it appreciates and
applies towards its own structure the universal element in these sciences,
their laws and classifications; but besides all this, into the categories
of science, it introduces, and gives currency to, other categories.
The difference looked at in this way is only a change of categories.”
The method of philosophy then is separated by no difference of kind
from the method of science, and must therefore also deal with experience.
It takes the materials of science, and carries further the process of
arrangement and analysis which science began. Whether, in doing so, it
actually goes so far as to destroy the basis from which it started, is a
question which will be considered later. 30 The changes which it produces
are in any case very extensive. Fresh categories are introduced,
and not merely as additions, but as altering materially the meaning of
the categories of science which now turn out to be abstract and of imperfect
validity. The process must not be confounded with one which
should simply carry scientific generalisations up to the highest point,