102. 116 1T12 CHAPTER I1

116 1T12 CHAPTER I1

soul, namely, that of the child in mother's womb when its feelings are not its own but those of the mother, we may justly say that Hegel had the child in the womb before the development of feeling as his illustration of the first stage. At the first stage, the soul is entirely empty and homogeneous. It has no distinction of any kind. It is mere homogeneous Blank. It has no distinction within itself. It has no conscious relation to anything. It is undifferentiated unity. No category is applicable to it, excepting that of being. There is no consciousness of anything external to it. It is for itself the totality of all existence. At the next stage, however, there is the slight rise of distinction within it. The mode, in which it is affected by the environment, appears within it as the mode of its being, as the quality which it has. But the mode of affection may change. The conscious- ness of this change in the mode of affection is the third, the stage of physical alteration. Hegel compares the first stage in the appearance of the soul, with the next two. While in the former case the soul is entirely empty, a mere blank, in the latter case there is implicit distinction between the soul, as mere blank, and the affections of the environment, which appear first as physical quality and then as physical alterations within it. The former is the state of deep dreamless sleep, and the latter is the state of waking. As the distinction between the empty, or blank, and the affection of the environment grows, there is the rise of sensations and feelings, of course, in a sense different from that in the ordinary use. Thus the soul is distinguished into (i) immediate being, blank and undifferentiated homogeneous universality and (ii) content, sensations and feelings, a multiplicity of diversi- fied particulars. The coalescence of these two is the actual