This view of concepts is Hegel’s revolutionary performance; but so studiously vague and ambiguous are all his expressions of it that one can hardly tell whether it is the concepts as such, or the sensible experiences and elements conceived, that Hegel really means to work with.  The only thing that is certain is that whatever you may say of his procedure, some one will accuse you of misunderstanding it.  I make no claim to understanding it, I treat it merely impressionistically.

So treating it, I regret that he should have called it by the name of logic.  Clinging as he did to the vision of a really living world, and refusing to be content with a chopped-up intellectualist picture of it, it is a pity that he should have adopted the very word that intellectualism had already pre-empted.  But he clung fast to the old rationalist contempt for the immediately given world of sense and all its squalid particulars, and never tolerated the notion that the form of philosophy might be empirical only.  His own system had to be a product of eternal reason, so the word ‘logic,’ with its suggestions of coercive necessity, was the only word he could find natural.  He pretended therefore to be using the a priori method, and to be working by a scanty equipment of ancient logical terms—­position, negation, reflection, universal, particular, individual, and the like.  But what he really worked by was his own empirical perceptions, which exceeded and overflowed his miserably insufficient logical categories in every instance of their use.

What he did with the category of negation was his most original stroke.  The orthodox opinion is that you can advance logically through the field of concepts only by going from the same to the same.  Hegel felt deeply the sterility of this law of conceptual thought; he saw that in a fashion negation also relates things; and he had the brilliant idea of transcending the ordinary logic by treating advance from the different to the different as if it were also a necessity of thought.  ‘The so-called maxim of identity,’ he wrote, ’is supposed to be accepted by the consciousness of every one.  But the language which such a law demands, “a planet is a planet, magnetism is magnetism, mind is mind,” deserves to be called silliness.  No mind either speaks or thinks or forms conceptions in accordance with this law, and no existence of any kind whatever conforms to it.  We must never view identity as abstract identity, to the exclusion of all difference.  That is the touchstone for distinguishing all bad philosophy from what alone deserves the name of philosophy.  If thinking were no more than registering abstract identities, it would be a most superfluous performance.  Things and concepts are identical with themselves only in so far as at the same time they involve distinction.’[1]