McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic

50/John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart
had ceased to be a living force, and when it was a generally accepted
view that the mind was adequate to the knowledge of reality. Under such
circumstances Hegel would naturally lay stress on the conclusions of
his system, in which he more or less differed from his contemporaries,
rather than on the original premises, in which he chiefly agreed with
them, and would point out how far the end was from the beginning,
rather than how clearly it might be derived from it. To this must be
added Hegel’s marked preference for a constructive, rather than a polemical
treatment, which appears so strongly in all his works. 32 But this
has exposed his system to severe disadvantages in the reaction against
all Idealism which has taken place since his death. For the transcendental
form becomes necessary when the attacks of scepticism have to be
met, and its absence, though due chiefly to the special character of the
audience to whom the philosophy was first addressed, has led to the
reproaches which have been so freely directed against Absolute Idealism,
as a mere fairy tale, or as a theory with internal consistency, but
without any relation to facts.
The same causes may perhaps account for the prominence of the
synthetic over the analytic aspect of the dialectic, which may be noticed
occasionally throughout the Logic. The criticism of idealists would naturally
be devoted more to the internal consistency of the system than to
its right to exist at all, on which point they would probably have no
objection to raise. To meet such criticisms it would be necessary to lay
emphasis on the synthetic side of the process, while to us, who in most
cases approach the whole question from a comparatively negative standpoint,
it would seem more natural to bring forward the analytic side,
and to show that the whole system was involved in any admission of the
existence of reality.
46. Hegel speaks of his logic as without any pre-supposition. This
is taken by Trendelenburg as equivalent to an assertion that it has no
basis in experience. But we have seen that the only postulate which
Hegel assumed was the validity of the category of Being—that is, the
existence of something. Now this, though not directly proved, can scarcely
be said to be assumed, if it is involved in all other assertions. And a
system which requires no other postulate than this might fairly be said
to have no presupposition. The very fact that the argument exists proves
that it was entitled to its assumption, for if the argument exists, then the
category of Being has validity, at any rate, of one thing—the argument
itself. And this is compatible with all the relation to experience which