PSYCHOLOGY AS PHILOSOPHIC METHOD. 171 by abstraction from the concrete. . . . We owe, there- fore, no apology for a return to the reality from which we took them." In short, it is necessity of fact, a necessity of conscious experience, which takes us from the realm of the Idee to the realm of nature, from the sphere of thought- conditions to the sphere of existent relations. " The same is true when we pass to the philosophy of spirit. The general form of personality is deducible, but not a living human spirit with its individual thoughts, feelings and actions." This remains " the incomprehensible and inexpli- cable point in philosophy". And so it does undoubtedly while we regard logic as method of philosophy. But this " inexplicability " is but the express condemnation of the method, not a fact to be contented with. If we go deeper and inquire not how is the transition from logic to the philosophy of nature or to the philosophy of spirit made, but how is any transition whatever possible, we find the same difficulty. It exists only by reason of the presupposed fact. " We cannot in strictness say that the result has been independently proved, because it has been reached in this fashion by the method. It was presupposed in the method all along." In a definite case, how is the transition, say from the category of quality to that of quantity, made ? It occurs not by virtue of the category of quality in itself, but by virtue of the fact that the whole Idee is implicitly contained in the principle of quality, and must manifest itself, which it does by forcing quality, as an inadequate ex- pression of its own nature, into quantity, which expresses its being more fully. And thus the process continues until the Idee has manifested itself as the whole organic system, which has expressed explicitly all that which in Idee it is. But this movement itself depends on spirit, and 011 the mani- festation of spirit in nature, as already seen. Every purely logical transition therefore occurs at bottom because of fact, i.e., seen in its wholeness it is not a logical transition but a factual. Psychology, as philosophic method, merely starts from this everywhere presupposed fact, and by so doing, for the first time, gives logic its basis and validity. There can be no escape from this result by saying that after all in the philosophy of spirit, spirit is shown to be the prius and condition of the whole, as it undoubtedly is by Hegel himself. This merely brings the contradiction itself into clearer light. For logic, being thus confessedly determined as abstract, is still retained to determine the nature of the concrete. Logic, while it is thus declared to be only one moment of spirit, is still used to determine the
