Nature and Spirit

Hegel's goal in his philosophy of subjective spirit is an empirically sensitive yet basically a priori science of mind. That sounds oxymoronic: How can a discipline be at once a priori and empirically sensitive? Here the elaborate structure of the Hegelian system serves a clear purpose. We have, first of all, the logic—the a priori element in all thought. The system's following two parts, the philosophies of nature and of spirit, bring the a priori structures of logic to bear on the empirical phenomena and thus are empirically sensitive as well as containing an a priori element. But empirical sensitivity is a matter of degree. What kinds of empirical discoveries would persuade Hegel (or us) to abandon the distinction between nature and spirit altogether? Certainly there are cases in which the distinction is far from clear, just as the distinction between the living and the non-living is unclear. But that there are indeed such distinctions, and that they are highly immune to empirical potshots, seems apparent. Hegel's system offers him a way