THE ABSOLUTE OF HEGELIANISM. 333 in finite lives. Granting that ultimate existence is somehow a process which presents itself to us as, in appearance, a system of interrelated lives, is it possible to call this a process of " experience " and to form a distinct conception of it which shall dispense with a self-conscious personality distinct from human life, on which human life depends ? It may be asked, in the first place, whether or not, on the Hegelian theory, this ultimate process which includes human selves is also to be regarded as a single conscious self. This question is for the most part not very clearly answered. On the one hand, the close connexion with earlier Hegelianism, between which and the newer form of the theory there is usually but little distinction drawn, points to this conception of God. This is most clearly exemplified in the case of Prof. Caird, who serves in a way as a transition between the two types of interpretation, and who combines both strains in his results, without apparently feeling the need of reconciling them. At one time he seems frankly to recognise that reality is a process, and to base his argument upon the recognition. It is in this way that he finds the reconciliation of subject and object. Consciousness " goes out of itself to objects in order through them to realise its unity with itself. The judgments by which we determine objects are steps in the synthetic process by which we finally reach the judgment of self-consciousness." J " The return upon self in self-con- sciousness is a positive movement by which the consciousness of (objects is completed." -' " Nature comes to self-consciousness in man." 3 " The dawn of consciousness in which the external object first comes into existence for us as opposed to the self, is at the same time the beginning of the process by which its externality is overcome." 4 " If it begins by opposing the world to itself, its next movement is to retract the opposition, to find itself therein. Consciousness, through the mediation of externality, realises itself, or becomes self- consciousness." 5 "A principle of unity . . . which finds its complete expression only in the relation of the process of nature to the self-consciousness which is developed in man." " " What from one point of view is the process whereby we become conscious of a self in opposition to objects, is from another point of view the process whereby the principle of their existence is disclosed, the process whereby, we might even say, they become conscious of themselves in us." 7 It 1 Kant, vol. i., p. 412. ' ll>id., p. 619.
- Lit. and Phil., vol. ii., p. 403. 4 Ibid., p. 472.
'Spinoza, p. 311. 6 Kant, vol. i., p. 77. ~ I bid., p. 263 ; cf. also pp. 23, 119, 616.
