In a version of the first step given by our foremost American
Hegelian,[4] we find this playing with the necessary form of judgment.
Pure being, he says, has no determinations. But the having none is
itself a determination. Wherefore pure being contradicts its own self,
and so on. Why not take heed to the _meaning_ of what is said? When
we make the predication concerning pure being, our meaning is merely
the denial of all other determinations than the particular one we make.
The showman who advertised his elephant as 'larger than any elephant in
the world except himself' must have been in an hegelian country where
he was afraid that if he were less explicit the audience would
dialectically proceed to say: {283} "This elephant, larger than any in
the world, involves a contradiction; for he himself is in the world,
and so stands endowed with the virtue of being both larger and smaller
than himself,--a perfect hegelian elephant, whose immanent
self-contradictoriness can only be removed in a higher synthesis. Show
us the higher synthesis! We don't care to see such a mere abstract
creature as your elephant." It may be (and it was indeed suggested in
antiquity) that all things are of their own size by being both larger
and smaller than themselves. But in the case of this elephant the
scrupulous showman nipped such philosophizing and all its inconvenient
consequences in the bud, by explicitly intimating that larger than any
_other_ elephant was all he meant.

Hegel's quibble with this word _other_ exemplifies the same fallacy.
All 'others,' as such, are according to him identical. That is,
'otherness,' which can only be predicated of a given thing _A_,
_secundum quid_ (as other than _B_, etc.), is predicated _simpliciter_,
and made to identify the _A_ in question with _B_, which is other only
_secundum aliud_,--namely other than _A_.

Another maxim that Hegelism is never tired of repeating is that "to
know a limit is already to be beyond it." "Stone walls do not a prison
make, nor iron bars a cage." The inmate of the penitentiary shows by
his grumbling that he is still in the stage of abstraction and of
separative thought. The more keenly he thinks of the fun he might be
having outside, the more deeply he ought to feel that the walls
identify him with it. They set him beyond them _secundum quid_, in
imagination, in longing, in despair; _argal_ they take him there
_simpliciter_ and {284} in every way,--in flesh,