Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 2 (of 3)Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 2 (of 3)
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy -- History
In the second place, because of their
being numbers, they express, as differences of magnitude, differences
in what is sensuous only. The system of apparent magnitude—and it is
in the heavenly system that magnitude appears most purely and freely,
liberated from what is qualitative—must correspond to them. But
these living number-spheres are themselves systems composed of many
elements—both of the magnitude of distance and of velocity and mass. No
one of these elements, taken as a succession of simple numbers, can be
likened to the system of heavenly spheres, for the series corresponding
to this system can, as to its members, contain nothing else than the
system of all these moments. Now if the Platonic numbers were also
the elements of each system such as this, it would not be only this
element which would have to be taken into account, for the relationship
of moments which become distinguished in movement has to be conceived
of as a whole, and is the true object of interest and reason. What we
have to do is to give briefly the main points as matter of history;
we have the most thorough treatment of it given us by Böckh “On the
Constitution of the World-Soul in the Timæus of Plato,” in the third
volume of the Studies of Daub and Creuzer (p. 26 _et seq._).
The fundamental series is very simple: “God first took one part out
of the whole; then the second, the double of the first; the third is
one and a half times as many as the second, or three times the first;
the next is double the second; the fifth is three times the third;
the sixth is eight times the first; the seventh is twenty-seven times
greater than the first.” Hence the series is: 1; 2; 3; 4 = 2²; 9 = 3²;
8 = 2³; 27 = 3³. “Then God filled up the double and triple intervals”
(the relations 1 : 2 and 1 : 3) “by again abstracting portions from
the whole. These parts he placed in the intervals in such a way that
in each interval there were two means, the one exceeding and exceeded
by the extremes in the same ratio, the other being that kind of mean
which by an equal number exceeds and is exceeded by the extremes.” That
is, the first is a constant geometric relationship, and the other is
an arithmetical. The first mean, brought about through the quadration,
is thus in the relation 1 : 2, for example, the proportion 1 : √̅2
: 2; the other is in the same relation, the number 1½. Hereby new
relations arise which are again in a specially given and more difficult
method inserted into that first, but this is done in such a way that
everywhere something has been left out, and the last relation of number
to number is 256 : 243, or 2^8 : 3^5.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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