26 THE WORLD-ENERGY 



hypothesis," it is evident that he regarded this as the 

 primal law of the reason, and as such necessarily self-evi- 

 dent in its truth. 



With such assurance from such a thinker, then, one 

 may well be encouraged to inquire with care and diligence 

 whether there may not be something more in this law, 

 even in the form ordinarily given it, than the shallow, 

 contradictory abstraction which, as simply the negative 

 power of the law of identity, it has been represented by 

 Hegel as being. * When it is declared that A can not be 

 both A and not A, it is implied in the very form of the 

 statement that A may be either A or not A, according as 

 it is siibjected to this or that set of conditions. It is sim- 

 ply declared that the two affirmations, " A begins " and 

 " A does not begin," could not possibly both be true at 

 the same time and in the same sense. 



But if A possesses any definiteness, that is, any reality, 

 then so far as the characteristics of A are determined by 

 any given set of conditions undergoing change, A must 

 necessarily change as the conditions change, and in so 

 doing must thus far necessarily become not A. For 

 example, with sufficient increase of temperature, a given 

 portion of carbon now constituting a diamond may be 

 vaporized and combined with oxygen; the resulting car- 

 bon-dioxide may be decomposed through absorption into a 

 vegetable organism, the carbon that was diamond now 

 becoming woody fiber, to undergo still further trans- 

 formation, perhaps into coal, etc., etc. 



Thus the same group of carbon particles may be both 

 diamond and not diamond. But if by this declaration it 

 is meant that both these mutually exclusive states can be 



*." Werke" (ate Auflage), VI., 230. 



