PhilosophyQuotes for July 10, 2000:

"With respect to the form of the _limitation_ and the _ought_, two prejudices can be criticised in more detail. First of all, great stress is laid on the limitations of thought, of reason, and so on, and it is asserted that the limitation _cannot_ be transcended. To make such as assertion is to be unaware that the very fact that something is determined as a limitation implies that the limitation is already transcended."

"Because the stone does not think, does not even feel, its limitedness is not a limitation _for it_, that is, is not a negation in it for sensation, imagination, thought, etc., which it does not possess."

"But it is reason, thought, which is supposed to be unable to transcend limitation reason, which is the _universal_ explicitly beyond particularity _as such_ (that is, _all_ particularity), which is nothing but the overcoming of limitation! Granted, not every instance of transcending and being beyond limitation is a genuine liberation from it, a veritable affirmation; even the ought itself, and abstraction in general, is in imperfect transcending."

- G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), Science of Logic (1812)

Science of Logic is available online at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1573922803/cmk1999