HEGELIAN CATEGORIES IN THE HEGELIAN ARGUMENT. 339 arrangement to follow on the consideration in book i. of Undetermined Being. It may be freely admitted that this change of order is not positively required. For the hypo- thesis, here discussed, that Reality is unknowable might be made at any point of Hegel's argument, and not merely at its beginning. But though the transposition is not strictly necessary, it is, on the other hand, both natural and logical. The destructive analysis of the doctrine of ultimate reality as unknowable Essence is more closely connected with the proof that Ultimate Reality is no Undetermined Being, than with any other section of the Logic, 1 in that both theories would make a positive metaphysics impossible. For this reason, the Essence hypothesis, like the Pure Being theory, appropriately precedes the positive discussions of the Logic. The transposition of the sections on Identity and Differ- ence, Likeness and Unlikeness would still, however, be imperatively needed, even if the discussion of Essence were left in its present place. As they stand, these categories Identity and the others come midway between the cate- gories of Essence and Appearance and the entirely parallel categories of Ground and Consequence. But, as our sum- mary of these sections has shown, 2 Identity, Difference, Likeness and Unlikeness are not relations of unknowable essence to the world of appearance, but rather categories of the connexion of determined realities within the world of appearance. Since, then, it is necessary to dislodge these categories Identity and the others from their present posi- tion, there can be no doubt that they follow most naturally on the parallel categories, in book i., of Reality and Negation, Somewhat and Other and the rest. The remaining changes of order suggested in this summary of Hegel's teaching will be readily allowed, when once the need of some change in the present order has been clearly apprehended. Some transposition of the categories is, in truth, demanded by the fact that Hegel's argument, in its present form, has the wholly fictitious and misleading ap- pearance of progress and steady advance from the earliest categories of Being to the final category of Absolute Idea. The truth is, however, that both book ii. and book iii. are largely composed of repetitions, in varied form and termino- logy, of the categories already discussed. Just because it doubles on itself, without proper warning, the Hegelian argument needs to be disentangled. The changes required consist merely in the juxtaposition of groups of equivalent 1 Cf. Werke, iv., 127. 2 Cf. p. 323, above.
