them—often empirically—justifies them, reasoning in all sorts of ways, and then attains to the truly speculative point of view. And finally, in the fourth place, Aristotle passes on thoughtfully to consider the object itself of which he treats, _e.g._ the soul, feeling, recollection, thought, motion, time, place, warmth, cold, &c. Because he takes all the moments that are contained within the conception to be, so to speak, united, he does not omit determinations; he does not hold now to one determination and then to another, but takes them as all in one; while reflection of the understanding, which has identity as the rule by which it goes, can only preserve harmony with this by always, while in one determination, forgetting and withholding the other. But Aristotle has the patience to go through all conceptions and questions, and from the investigation of the individual determinations, we have the fixed, and once more restored determination of every object. Aristotle thus forms the Notion, and is in the highest degree really philosophic, while he appears to be only empiric. For Aristotle’s empiricism is a totality because he always leads it back again immediately to speculation; he may thus be said to be a perfect empiricist, yet at the same time a thinking one. If, for example, we take away from space all its empirical determinations, the result will be in the highest degree speculative, for the empirical, comprehended in its synthesis, is the speculative Notion. In this gathering up of determinations into one Notion, Aristotle is great and masterly, as he also is in regard to the simplicity of his method of progression, and in the giving of his decisions in few words. This is a method of treating of Philosophy which has great efficacy, and which in our time has likewise been applied, _e.g._ by the French. It deserves to come into larger use, for it is a good thing to lead the determinations of the ordinary conception from an object to thought, and then to unite them in a unity, in the Notion. But undoubtedly this method in one respect appears to be empirical, and that, indeed, in the acceptation of objects as we know them in our consciousness; for if no necessity is present, this still more appears merely to pertain to manner externally regarded. And yet it cannot be denied that with Aristotle the object was not to bring everything to a unity, or to reduce determinations to a unity of opposites, but, on the contrary, to retain each in its determination and thus to follow it up. That may, on the one hand, be a superficial method, _e.g._ when everything is brought to an empty determinateness, such as those of irritability and sensibility, sthenic and asthenic, but, on the other, it is likewise necessary to grasp reality in simple determinateness, though without making the latter in this superficial way the starting point. Aristotle, on the other hand, simply forsakes determination in another sphere where it no longer has this form; but