Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/187

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HEGEL'S TREATMENT OF THE SUBJECTIVE NOTION. 171 by their participation in it. Things, again, are united by the reciprocal determinations which we have established among them. But these are clearly not Universal Notions. If A is the cause of B, and B the cause of A, they have not in so far the same quality, though they have closely analo- gous qualities, and qualities which we are now entitled to regard as inseparable. The relation of things which have the same Notion is not that of mutual determination, but of similarity. Any common quality such as whiteness, square- ness, sweetness is a Universal Notion. (We are here, it must be remembered, at the very beginning of the Notion. In the later categories the meaning of the word becomes much deeper.) The category of Reciprocity informed us that all the qualities of every object could be accounted for by the mutual determinations which existed between it' and other- objects. Now of these qualities we knew previously that every object had some qualities in common with every other, and that no object had precisely the same qualities as any other. This was established, early in the Doctrine of Essence, by the category of Likeness and Unlikeness. It falls beyond the scope of this paper, but in passing we may point out that if two objects had no qualities in common, they could not be counted, or brought into any relation, which is incompatible with the hypothesis that they were two, and that they were different. On the other hand, if two different objects had precisely the same qualities, it would follow that the difference between them could only be in their essence. But this difference in their essence would, on the hypothesis, have no effect on their appear- ance, which obviously destroys all meaning in the terms essence and appearance. From Likeness and Unlikeness to Eeciprocity there are many categories, but none of them transcend this particular characteristic of the former. And so we reach our present point in the dialectic with the conclusion that the various qualities in the reciprocally determined things must be such that no thing is entirely like or entirely unlike any other thing. The result is that things are doubly connected by similarity and by causation. And it is obvious that a thing may be, and generally is, connected by the one tie to things very different to those to which it is connected by the other. A sparrow in England resembles very closely a sparrow in Australia, though the influence exerted by one on the other may be as slight as can possibly exist between any two beings on the same planet. On the other hand the English sparrow's