r material filling out.

Shylock's bond was an omnipotent instrument compared with this
knowledge of the finite, which remains the ignorance it always was,
till the infinite by its own act has piece by piece placed itself in
our hands.

Here Hegelism cries out: "By the identity of the knowledges of infinite
and finite I never meant that one could be a _substitute_ for the
other; nor does true philosophy ever mean by identity capacity for
substitution." This sounds suspiciously like the good and the naughty
infinite, or rather like the mysteries of the Trinity and the
Eucharist. To the unsentimental mind there are but two sorts of
identity,--total identity and partial identity. Where the identity is
total, the things can be substituted wholly for one another. Where
substitution is impossible, it must be that the identity is incomplete.
It is the duty of the student then to ascertain the exact _quid,
secundum_ which it obtains, as we have tried to do above. Even the
Catholic will tell you that when he believes in the {286} identity of
the wafer with Christ's body, he does not mean in all respects,--so
that he might use it to exhibit muscular fibre, or a cook make it smell
like baked meat in the oven. He means that in the one sole respect of
nourishing his being in a certain way, it is identical with and can be
substituted for the very body of his Redeemer.

'The knowledge of opposites is one,' is one of the hegelian first
principles, of which the preceding are perhaps only derivatives. Here
again Hegelism takes 'knowledge' _simpliciter_, and substituting it for
knowledge in a particular respect, avails itself of the confusion to
cover other respects never originally implied. When the knowledge of a
thing is given us, we no doubt think that the thing may or must have an
opposite. This postulate of something opposite we may call a
'knowledge of the opposite' if we like; but it is a knowledge of it in
only that one single respect, that it is something opposite. No number
of opposites to a quality we have never directly experienced could ever
lead us positively to infer what that quality is. There is a jolt
between the negation of them and the actual positing of it in its
proper shape, that twenty logics of Hegel harnessed abreast cannot
drive us smoothly over.

The use of the maxim 'All determination is negation' is the fattest and
most full-blown application of the method of refusing to distinguish.
Taken