Cognition and Finite Spirit

If, for Hegel, the subjective logic completes the study of pure thought, how can he then include discussions of nature and spirit in his philosophy? Why does thought, which includes mechanism, chemism, and the idea of life, have to extend its range to what we can call the philosophy of the real? To answer this question, I have already compared what he says in the chapters on chemism and life with the chemical and organic sections of his philosophy of nature.1 But the real world includes the realm of spirit. In the introduction to his chapter on "The Idea of Cognition," Hegel himself mentions his anthropology, phenomenology, and psychology:

[T]he Idea of spirit as the subject matter of logic already stands within the pure science; it has not therefore to watch spirit progressing through its entanglement with nature, with immediate determinate-ness and material things, or with [representation]; this is dealt with in the three sciences mentioned above [anthropology, phenomenology and psychology].2

On the other hand, although his doctrine of spirit in the Realphilosophie should include the "object of normal empirical psychology "3 it does not develop its task empirically, but scientifically. The contingency of contemporary psychology is stressed in paragraph 378 of the Encyclopedia:

Empirical psychology has concrete spirit for its object, and because, with the renaissance of science, observation and experience have become the primary foundation for the cognition of the concrete, it has been practiced in the same way. As a result, on the one hand meta-physics [rational psychology] was retained outside of this ...

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