Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 1 (of 3) — Georg Hegel — John Shaqi
Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 1 (of 3)
Georg Hegel · en
This is a simple relationship to number-determinations. Aristotle
instances (De anim. I. 3) one more intricate from Timæus: “The soul
moves itself, and hence also the body because it is bound up with body;
it consists of elements and is divided according to harmonic numbers,
and hence it has feeling and an immediately indwelling (_σύμφυτον_)
harmony. In order that the whole may have an harmonious movement,
Timæus has bent the straight line of harmony (_εὐθυωρίαν_) into a
circle, and again divided off from the whole circle two circles,
which are doubly connected; and the one of these circles is again
divided into seven circles, so that the movements of the soul may
resemble those of the heavens.” The more definite significance of these
ideas Aristotle unfortunately has not given; they contain a profound
knowledge of the harmony of the whole, but yet they are forms which
themselves remain dark, because they are clumsy and unsuitable. There
is always a forcible turning and twisting, a struggle with the material
part of the representation, as there is in mythical and distorted
forms: nothing has the pliability of thought but thought itself. It
is remarkable that the Pythagoreans have grasped the soul as a system
which is a counterpart of the system of the heavens. In Plato’s Timæus
this same idea is more definitely brought forward. Plato also gives
further number-relations, but not their significance as well; even to
the present day no one has been able to make any particular sense out
of them. An arrangement of numbers such as this is easy, but to give to
it a real significance is difficult, and, when done, it always must be
arbitrary.