82 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1869- 



italicising of exactly is precisely the nerve of the 

 quotation/ (Pages ioS, 109.) 



This is a grave charge. Yet, strange to say, it is my 

 translation that is right, and Dr. Stirling s that is wrong ; 

 for what Hegel says is, &quot; dass es sich nicht genau so, d.i., 

 in dem Punkte, welcher der Nerv des Beweises ist, sich 

 nicht so verhalte, wie Newton annimmt.&quot; And still more 

 strangely, Dr. Stirling himself translates the passage 

 correctly in The Secret of Hegel, ii. 377, &quot; admitted that the 

 truth is not exactly so, i.e. that in the point which is the 

 nerve of the proof the truth is not as Newton assumes it.&quot; 

 I simply transcribed Dr. Stirling s own words ; and, if I 

 omitted the words &quot; not exactly so,&quot; I gave Hegel s own 

 explanation of their meaning. 



This is not the only case where philological inexactitude 

 has prevented Dr. Stirling from doing justice to my 

 arguments. 



In the case of a falling body, the space described is 

 proportional to the square of the time during which the 

 body has been falling. Lagrange, stating this fact, 

 remarks that Nature does not present any case in which 

 the distance passed through is proportional to the cube of 

 the time. On this Hegel, always full of Kepler s laws, 

 says that we have at least a motion for which the cube of 

 the distance is proportional to the square of the time, and 

 begs the mathematicians to apply their calculus to the 

 differential of this motion. This remark of Hegel is 

 equivalent to a proof of absolute mathematical incom- 

 petency. Kepler s law does not mean that the cube of the 

 distance traversed by the planet is proportional to the 

 square of the time during which it has been moving ; but 

 simply that each planet goes round the sun in a time the 

 square of which is proportioned to the cube of its mean 

 distance from the sun. The proposal to differentiate the 

 formula expressing this fact shows that Hegel did not 

 know what sort of quantities are really capable of differ 

 entiation. Now, Dr. Stirling s own knowledge on this 



