The Ethical Theory of Hegel/Chapter 1

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The Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, with which we are chiefly concerned in this book, is the last important systematic work which Hegel himself published, and it has Hegel’s general system as a background. In order to understand it we have to begin some distance off. I propose in this chapter to discuss some important aspects of his logical theory, for in it the roots of his ethical doctrines are to be found. In the next chapter I shall explain in greater detail some of the principles which his logic lays bare, and on the comprehension of which the interpretation and judgement of his ethical philosophy depends.

Philosophy for Hegel covers three main provinces, logic, nature, and mind; and the sciences of these three realms give us progressive, yet inter-related, analyses of reality and experience. Hegel’s view of logic is remote from that of the ordinary text-book. What is usually called formal logic occupies itself chiefly with an account of various processes of thought whereby inferences can be consistently drawn from assumed premises. This analysis is generally prefaced by a statement, partly logical, partly grammatical, partly psychological, of the ‘elements’ of thought—the pieces with which the game is played. By logic Hegel means something more important than this: he offers an analysis of the fundamental constitutive principles of the content of all experience; and the specific forms of ‘right reasoning’, as detailed in the usual formal logic, occupy a subordinate place in the whole. In order to see how he reaches this position we may look at the matter from two points of view; firstly, the necessity of the case, and secondly, the historical development—mainly with reference to Kant.

Logic in the narrower sense attempts to be a self-contained body of doctrine with a recognized sphere and a special method. It separates itself from the theory of knowledge and from metaphysics, and it claims that its own province is ​capable of scientific treatment without reference to the wider problems—e.g., the relation of knowledge to reality, and the ultimate nature of things—which come within the scope of the larger philosophical sciences. The claim is at first sight supported by actual achievement: text-books are numberless; they are written by men of the most diverse views on epistemology and metaphysics; and yet there seems to be established a certain consensus gentium regarding the substance of the science. Closer examination, however, disturbs this superficial appearance. The average text-book professes to be merely an introduction; it repeats the traditional views on the traditional topics with little attempt to weave the material into a whole. A concluding chapter sometimes takes up the problems which have been slurred over in the actual exposition itself, and points to epistemology and metaphysics as the proper field for their fuller treatment. The disagreement between the writers becomes acute at this stage; the nature of the ‘reference’ of thought to reality is variously interpreted, the relation between the ‘laws of thought’—probably briefly mentioned at an early stage, and postponed for discussion until the end—and the minor laws of inference is treated in many mutually exclusive ways, and many solutions are given of the problem of the meaning of the ‘form of thought’. The problems are not pressed home until the body of logic has been laid forth, and yet it is the solution of these and other similar questions which should mark off the subject-matter and determine the treatment. The apparent unanimity is due rather to vis inertiae, to the acceptance of a traditional logical datum, than to a genuine harmony concerning the nature of right reasoning. If a student seeks to go beyond these introductions, he speedily discovers that the postponed logical problems contain the very substance of logic, and that the boundary wall between logic and metaphysics falls when he approaches it.

It may be taken for granted that logic deals with true thought. If so, is it possible to analyse the nature of true thinking without reference to the object of knowledge? The word, thought, is without doubt an ambiguous one, and covers a fatal tendency to confuse the act of thinking, a psychological subject-matter, with the object or content known. The question of a distinction between ‘object’ and ‘content’ ​is passed over for the present: it seems clear that it is a distinction within a single point of view, both falling within the vision of the thinker himself and being distinct from that which a spectator, occupying the psychological standpoint, notes as the elements and laws of the temporal act of thinking. The same ambiguity attaches to the word, experience, when the act of experiencing is confused with what is experienced. In both cases the two meanings are inseparable aspects of a single process, and neither apart from the other is more than a one-sided abstraction:^[1] for the psychological standpoint is that of an external spectator, and it is obvious that a spectator does not see all that there is unless he apprehends the content present to the subject himself; and, on the other hand, the subject’s own knowledge is limited if the psychological aspect, the process of the content, is beyond his view. At the same time the aspects are not to be identified in a crude and immediate fashion. Whether or not either attitude is capable of including the other—a point we need not determine at present—it is clear that in the ordinary case the process apprehended by the psychologist and the content apprehended by the subject are widely different; and one must avoid filling up gaps in the analysis of one side by material borrowed from the other without a definite justification. In our question the term, thought or thinking, refers to the content of thought, to that which is apprehended; and the problem concerns the possibility of stating the fundamental laws of apprehending thought in complete isolation from that which is apprehended; in other words, the independence of logic.

The independence of logic may be maintained in two ways. On the one hand the ambiguity of the term, thought, may be exploited, and psychological laws of the order of thoughts in time may be offered as logic. This device hardly needs criticism. The other method is to draw a sharp line between the content of thought and the ‘real’ object, and to declare that the content—all thought-forms as such—is subjective. This is, for example, Lotze’s method in logic. The fundamental objection to the procedure is that it involves a dualism between knowledge and reality, which makes knowledge possible only by an unending miracle. If all the forms of thought are subjective, if its modes of connexion answer to ​nothing in the real world, how can the result give us a content in any way like the trans-subjective world of things? Moreover, how can the exponent of such a view know that the laws of thinking are subjective and its results objective? Such knowledge implies independent acquaintance with the real world in order to compare it point for point with the content of knowledge. The argument need not be elaborated farther: it is clear that this view of logic is so far from being free from epistemology and metaphysics that it is based on a view of knowledge which separates knowledge from things, and it has sufficient information about reality to distinguish the laws of the latter from the modes and principles of the content of thought.^[2] This contention, however, by no means settles the question. Perhaps if we give up the untenable dualism between the content of knowledge and the object known, we may devise a distinction within the content of knowledge between subjective modes of organizing the material apprehended and objective principles of things. But such a distinction, although a genuine one when regarded in a certain way, is an abandonment of the original scope and task of logic. It gives up the problem of analysing the forms of knowing as a whole, and breaks up the total content into two sections without exposing what they have in common. If logic identifies its object with one of these divisions there remains room for another logic, more faithful to its primary duty, which will lay bare the principles involved in any apprehended content, whether existing in external nature or not.

Hegel’s logic claims this larger task. If logic is to maintain itself as the science of the principles of the content of knowledge, it must cease to diminish its stature to the measure of the merely subjective, and must advance to an analysis of the structural principles of a thought which can apprehend any object. But it is obvious that such an analysis is metaphysical as well as logical. It is conversant not only with the principles of thinking, but also with those of that which is thought; and it cannot but seek to determine the conditions of an intelligible world, the only world with which we have any concern. Naturally, if reality is identified with ​actual existence in space and time, and metaphysics identified with the science of such a reality, then logic is wider than metaphysics. But such is not the sense of metaphysics in which Hegel’s logic is metaphysical. Existence in space and time is part of a wider whole; and there are principles which are operative in things, but which cannot be said to have existence in this limited sense. This point may become clearer at a later stage of the argument; at present it is enough to note that from the present point of view the object of metaphysics is the entire scheme of things, the wholeness of the world, of which existence in nature is but one mode. Logic, as metaphysical, is the science of the principles of a thought whose content is the whole, the absolute, the real, or whatever else be its name.

Having found the standpoint of logic, we may refer briefly to its limitation. The known world, for Hegel, falls into two main divisions, viz., nature and mind. These are part of one world known by a single apprehending consciousness, and therefore subject to the fundamental laws which make knowledge and an object intelligible. But nevertheless each realm has forms and laws of its own; each has a character which cannot be attributed to the other, and it works out the basal principles of intelligible objects in its own way. For our present purpose it is perhaps better not to regard the special laws of these realms as new principles; they are rather more concrete developments of the fundamental forms of all knowledge, fresh and separate ways of exemplifying them, articulations of them, their expression in new media. This throws into relief the community of spheres, and it is to these underlying principles of both realms that logic is limited. The philosophy of nature is the account of the principles as they appear in the outward world; the philosophy of mind exposes them in the shapes which they take in conscious life; logic is the discussion of them by themselves, without reference to their higher special embodiments.

We may now consider briefly the historical development of Hegel’s position from that of Kant. Kant had inquired into the conditions of synthetic a priori judgements. Mathematics offered him a type of these judgements, and he raised the question, How is it possible for such knowledge to be universal and necessary and yet to apply to objects? Mere analysis ​which keeps within the realm of mental concepts had, for him, an obvious universality, but it could not add to our knowledge of things, could not prophesy new conjections in experience. Its breadth was due to its shallowness. On the other hand, empirical knowledge provides a synthetic union of diverse elements of experience, but it dare not transcend the present moment and the actual synthesis given. But these strange judgements of mathematics speak confidently, not depending on experience, and yet giving us fresh knowledge of objective things! In order to explain this kind of knowledge Kant found it necessary to carry over that activity of knowledge, in accordance with which its decrees possess universality in the realm of mind, into the province of actual experience. If the objects of experience, he argued, are amenable to the universality which belongs of right to thought and which cannot be obtained empirically, then thought must have a share in the constitution of the objects of experience.

The problem soon broadened out from its original form. Previous philosophy, Kant thought, had gone on the assumption that the task of knowledge is to correspond to an independent object out of essential relation to knowledge, and scepticism had been the outcome. For if the object is ex vi termini beyond knowledge and independent of it, there is no guarantee that the content known stands in any relation to the independent and unknown real. Taking his stand, therefore, on the validity of knowledge, Kant asks, What must be true of the object in order that it may be known? The boasted independence of the object quickly disappears under this treatment, and Kant discovers one condition of knowledge after another to which objects must conform if they are to be intelligible. These conditions, Kant thought, do not hold of the independent object, the thing-in-itself, but they govern the phenomenal object, that which can be known. Kant, however, does not dismiss the conception of the independent object, but continues to contrast it with the known object; and by virtue of the opposition condemns the latter as subjective.

The extent to which Kant transcended this crude dualism does not concern us here, because the thing-in-itself never disappears from his argument. Even when other reasons are offered for the subjectivity of the known object, e.g. in the ​antinomies, the conflict within experience has ultimately no other basis than the original dualism of mind and outward reality. The various minor collisions, e.g., between sense and understanding, understanding and reason, constitutive and regulative principles, practical reason and theoretic reason, and so forth, are all modifications of the primary uncritical supposition; and if it is withdrawn their substance has vanished. So long as they remain unchecked, the influence of the thing-in-itself persists. That is to say, Kant’s inquiry into the conditions of an intelligible world is conducted under the guidance of a firm dualism of subject and object, in accordance with which universality and form are attributed to the former, particularity and content to the latter. If experience manifests universality, he argues, it is mind-made and subjective. From this Hegel dissents.^[3] For Kant, in so far as he is a dualist, the distinction between subjective and objective coincides with that between knowledge and what is beyond knowledge. And, although his main contribution to epistemology is a new sense of objectivity which falls within experience, yet there remains in the background the original conception of the objective as independent and trans-subjective. Such a distinction is, for Hegel, unmeaning. The unknowable is the most absurd of all conceptions, and the least interesting to rational beings; it is a direct contradiction in terms. The only significant distinction between subjective and objective falls within the field of knowledge; it marks off various contents from one another, and does not separate the knowable from the unknowable. When the trans-subjective thing-in-itself vanishes, the contrast between it and the phenomenal or subjective object loses all point; and hence the phenomenal objectivity which Kant had set up within experience developed for Hegel into real objectivity. With this change of attitude came a great change of content. The fundamental principles which make experience possible were, for Kant, few in number, and the principles of pure thought involved amounted only to twelve. Hegel pushed the analysis much further; he found logical principles continuous with the categories and principles of the understanding both above and below them; and thus in place of Kant’s limited list there arises the whole elaborate structure of Hegel’s logic.

​Before dealing with any of the details of this scheme we may summarize Hegel’s position. Kant found an a priori element in experience, a universality which transcended the given; but he wrongly identified it with the subjective, the mind-made. Hegel swept this identification aside. These principles, he argued, apply to the known as such, subject as well as thing; they are doubtless principles of thought, but they are no less principles of the world; they go beneath the opposition of subjective and objective, they characterize all experience, and are not more truly called mental than are particular laws of nature—nor less so. Kant’s Critique professed to be epistemological, an inquiry into the nature and limits of the knowing faculty; Hegel’s investigation is frankly logical and metaphysical. It deals directly with the known world, and investigates the knowing which apprehends objects.

Hegel’s objective standpoint has given rise to the charge that he proposes to evolve the world out of his own inner consciousness. The criticism may mean many things. It may imply that Hegel sat down in the seclusion of his study, shut out in so far as he could all reference to common experience, and concocted an arbitrary scheme from the idiosyncracies of his private fancies. This is a matter of evidence and need not raise the general question of the ultimate relation of reason and science; for such capricious imaginings are condemned as much by the sanity of thought as by experimental knowledge of fact. Hegel must not be prejudged on this point, for he claims that his method is not private and fanciful but open and rational. On the other hand the criticism may cut deeper. It may rest on the assumption that reason and the truth fall apart, and that a theory may be wholly rational and yet untrue. From this point of view, to evolve the world out of one’s inner consciousness means simply to exercise a rational and critical activity. It is only in this sense that Hegel would admit the truth of the statement, and his whole theory is a denial of the accompanying supposition that apart from and beyond reasonable knowledge there is anything with which knowledge is in any way concerned. It should be clear from what has been said that from Hegel’s standpoint the nature of the cognitive subject is fundamentally one with that of his world. The constitutive ​principles of his rational mind are also those of that which he apprehends. Thus it is true that in unfolding the nature of mind Hegel is analysing or remaking for knowledge the principles of things; but it is no less true that the evolution of an arbitrary scheme in the mind is not the analysis of reality—it is not the analysis of mind itself. By bringing the world and mind into harmony Hegel has made metaphysics possible, but at the same time he has made logic, the key, more difficult by extending its content and forcing it to wait on the nature of things. Sometimes Hegel’s argument seems capricious and fine-spun, but in general there is no reasonable doubt of his conviction that, in the order of learning, experience is prior to rational thought.^[4] We live before we reflect on life, and a wide experience is necessary for the ingathering of the meaning of experience. Indeed, one of the more striking characteristics of Hegel’s own thought is its persistence and perseverance; and his contempt for fanciful speculation and for formalism is unbounded.^[5] Experience, or fact, is the basis of all thought and all science; and a philosophy which cannot cover life and is built in abstraction from the considerations of practice is a futility of the understanding.

But experience is only the beginning. What is given is not the final truth, not the finished perfect work which alone deserves the name of the real; it is rather a problem, a vague we-know-not-what. Thought has to interpret the datum, and solve the problem; and the succession of general principles by means of which we attempt this interpretation is the content of logic. One of the most fruitful ways of regarding Hegel’s Logic is to look upon it as a protracted and thorough study of the relations of unity and difference, or of universal and particular. Each category, or determination, is a general principle by which we seek to make experience a consistent whole and render it a concrete universal; and each has its own way of relating the two root factors, viz., unity and difference.

Before discussing any of the categories themselves, however, it is necessary to glance at three preliminary points; the connexion of the categories, the order of their exposition, and the motive power of the development.

​In the first place, the principles of thought are interconnected. For a genuine empiricism the world is not a whole but a series of numberless parts—parts in no wise connected with one another. The series can be a unity for an apprehending consciousness only if it is thought under principles which hold it together and connect its various portions. Every principle of thought has this function, and the task of knowledge is to discover them. Kant, as we have seen, gave these principles a subjective turn, and supposed that they were foisted upon the material of knowledge, and that the mind made its objects. Hegel is quite aware of the activity of thought here, but he recognizes the objective side also. The laws and principles in question are those which constitute the world; they are those which things must contain if they are to form an intelligible world at all—and what is not intelligible is not a world. But it is not enough that there should be a variety of laws discernible in the objects of knowledge. A number of separate principles would give us, not one world, but as many worlds as there are special forms of unity. Moreover these worlds would be absolutely out of relation to one another, and could have no commerce. Moreover, they could not be known to one and the same mind; indeed, to speak more accurately, we should have no right to call them all worlds, for to be a world is to possess a special type of unity, and ex hypothesi the types are all different. Mind is a unity, intelligence is the same in principle in all its activities, and all the objects it can know must belong inherently to the one scheme of things. If the objective anarchy which we have suggested were the case, we should need as many minds as there were principles in order to apprehend them, and the mind would be shattered into fragments. If the mind is to be a unity, its object must also be a unity and constitute one world. But the various portions of the content of knowledge can form a whole only if unifying principles themselves cohere; for the principles are the unity of the world. That is to say, what Kant calls the synthetic a priori principles of knowledge, or what we may call the constitutive principles of what is known, are linked together and form a rational and coherent whole. Their own inter-connexion is, on the one hand, the essence of the unity of the intelligible world, and, on the other, of the rationality of the ​knowing mind. We are not dealing with two quite differently organized things, a mind and a world; we are dealing with the fundamental principles of the intelligible content of rational thought; and the coherence of both aspects depends on the coherence of the principles themselves.

The second point is the order of the philosophic exposition of these principles. Hegel’s view of this is somewhat complex, and is to be fully understood only when the complete exposition is mastered. The peculiar method he adopts is called by him the dialectic, and I shall have to recur to it at various stages of the discussion. The point to be indicated here is an obvious and somewhat superficial one. Hegel sets out from the barest and emptiest of the principles of possible thought; he begins at the bottom and works upwards. The main alternatives seem to be either that of beginning anywhere and working at random, or that of beginning at the top and working downwards. The first of these alternatives is plainly inadequate. It is not a method, but the failure of one; and it cannot exhibit the categories in their rational inter-connexion. Lotze seems to think that it is the only possible attitude for a modest mind; but if this be so, then it seems clear that the mind in question has not pushed its investigation of experience far enough to reach the level of philosophy. It is still preoccupied with the order of learning, and has not attained to the order of explanation. Such a process is preliminary to philosophy, and Hegel himself went through it^[6]; but he did not put his results forward as logic until he had emancipated himself from the adolescence it implies. The other method is that expressly enunciated by Spinoza, and Hegel rejects it. Spinoza begins with the whole, with substance, the final reality. But the difficulty immediately arises: If we start with the perfect principle why do we go further? Spinoza makes progress because what he calls the whole is not really such, but has beyond it another world of ‘modes’—in general, Natura naturata.^[7] Hegel calls this method that of emanation. ‘It is a series of ​deteriorating stages’, he says, ‘which begin with the complete, with the absolute totality, with God. God has created; and from Him have come forth radiations, reflections, and likenesses, of which the first is most akin to Him. The first production also shows activity, but less completely, and so downwards . . . to the negative, matter, the extreme of evil. Thus the emanation ends with the lack of all form’.^[8]

There is a sense in which we must begin with the whole. Until we become aware of the wholeness of being we are not on philosophic ground, and are unable to trace the interrelations of the principles of experience. The order of the dialectic process is guided by an ever present consciousness of the highest stages, and it is not until we reach the last of the three main divisions that we see clearly by what path we have come. At first it is not explicitly known to us that the principle we use is that of single reality: we begin with the poorest possible way of characterizing things and pass upwards to more concrete attitudes of thought. This order may be regarded in two ways; it is a process from abstract to concrete, and it is a movement from the external to the internal. The effort of thought at first is to take one thing at a time; the unities which thought imposes on things are very loose, and express but few of their relations. As thought rises in the scale its principles become more concrete, they gain wealth and depth. That is to say, they express the object more truly. They present more adequately its relations to its context and to the whole system of which it forms a part; and that is why Hegel uses the word, concrete, in this connexion.

The other way of characterizing the movement gives us a point of transition to the discussion of its motive power. The lower categories are abstract because they are external. Most of reality lies beyond their grasp; things are presented singly, and thought does not see how each determines the nature of the others and enters into their being. In Hegel’s view the Nemesis of such thought is that it turns into its opposite. Take the simplest example. The first category of the Logic is being. The simplest, barest, and least affirmation we can make is that indicated by the word ‘is’. But if we say no more than this, what have we said? We must strip off the idea of a ‘thing’; the assertion is not that such and ​such a definite object is, for a ‘definite object’ involves much more than does mere ‘being’. We are to say ‘is’, and nothing else. But when we have said this our meaning is indistinguishable from ‘nothing’. If we take away all the particular qualities of things, we abstract from them everything by means of which we distinguish what is from what is not. Being which is not existence in some place and time, and under some special circumstances, and so forth, is as good as non-existence—it is the same as non-existence. Hegel’s contention is that if we are in earnest with our thought and carry it as far as it will go, such a category changes in our hands and shows a meaning which we try to exclude from it. This state of things can be mended only when we adopt a more concrete principle which includes both aspects as part of itself. That is to say, the implication of the one aspect in the other is at the first level a force compelling thought from outside; at the second level it is part of the content of thought itself. When we force reality, as it were, into one of these primitive categories and try to take it abstractly, it avenges itself by turning into another form. The neglected aspects appear in spite of us, and the despised unity of the system as a whole reveals itself by forcing a half idea to turn into its opposite. This change, however, is not part of the category itself. That is to say, the change is immediate for the thinker who uses such principles; he does not apprehend the inner nexus which produces the conversion, and each term is, for him, unmediated by its opposite. Generally speaking, we are offered the alternative of unity or difference by these bare and elementary forms of thought; and the abstractness of our choice amends itself by the unforeseen passage of the one element into the other. In the higher reaches of the dialectic the various aspects have been incorporated by thought to such an extent that the process is not from one aspect to its complementary by this primarily negative path, but is a more straight-forward development; and Hegel speaks of it as mere play.^[9]

This brings us to the third point, the power behind the process. This has been said to be contradiction.^[10] But such ​a view is shallow; for one immediately asks, What is behind the contradiction? Contradiction itself is the immediate opposition of one phase of an object by another; but at the back of it is the power of the whole. We may use Hegel’s theory of tragedy to throw some light on his Logic at this point. Hegel finds the essence of tragedy to lie in a conflict between spiritual forces which belong to one system and which ought to be in harmony. The catastrophe is the assertion by the whole of its complexity against the one-sidedness of some imperfect aspect. When the conflict is between two individuals, each, from the tragic point of view, is dominated by some aspect of the whole good, perhaps an ethical claim such as the duty to one’s kindred, perhaps a wider end, such as natural justice, honour, or the ambition of a strong man; and this is followed to the exclusion of all else. The devotion to this abstract ideal, good in itself but imperfect when set against the rest of life, brings the agent into collision with other factors and with the whole; and in the conflict the tragic hero is overthrown. The final note of tragedy, however, is not loss. Over and above the confusion and destruction of that which is imperfect and by the nature of things transitory there is the assertion of the full and rounded character of reality. The positive side, of course, is not fully developed in tragedy, but if it be utterly lacking the tragedy is imperfect and inartistic—it is merely a pitiful tale. Behind the sympathy with the fallen there must be a feeling of the greater good which the agent himself was unable to grasp, and his fall is a vindication of the deeper truth. We need not discuss any of the details of the exposition; the only point of present importance is that the fate which destroys a tragic hero is not a mere external force, it is in him as well as about him.

Mr. A. C. Bradley gives excellent expression to the situation thus. ‘If . . . this necessity were merely infinite, characterless, external force, the catastrophe would not only terrify (as it should), it would also horrify, depress, or at best provoke indignation or rebellion; and these are not tragic feelings. The catastrophe, then, must have a second and affirmative aspect, which is the source of our feelings of reconciliation, whatever form they may assume. And this will be taken into account if we describe the catastrophe as a violent ​self-restitution of the divided spiritual unity. The necessity which acts and negates in it, that is to say, is yet of one substance with both the agents. It is divided against itself in them; they are its conflicting forces; and in restoring its unity through negation it affirms them, so far as they are compatible with that unity. The qualification is essential, since the hero, for all his affinity with that power, is, as the living man we see before us, not so compatible. He must die, and his union with ‘eternal justice’ (which is more than ‘justice’) must itself be ‘eternal’ or ideal. But the qualification does not abolish what it qualifies. There is no occasion to ask how in particular, and in what various ways in various works, we feel the effect of this affirmative aspect in the catastrophe. But it corresponds at least with that strange double impression which is produced by the hero’s death. He dies, and our hearts die with him; and yet his death matters nothing to us, or we even exult. He is dead; and he has no more to do with death than the power which killed him and with which he is one.’^[11]

Now logic in principle is even more than tragedy; for it is the express reconciliation of the subordinated elements, and the rational completion of lower principles in a whole into which they are carried without remainder. Logic is not encumbered by the actual living man, and the dialectic is not a history of personal sufferings which cannot be made good. Although at first dialectic changes are external and unintelligible to the mind which uses elementary principles, yet these changes themselves are seen by fuller knowledge to be a self-evolution of the complete truth. In its higher stages thought has to include the lower categories, and the elements of perfect knowledge are known by it as opposites.^[12] But although tragedy and the dialectic differ in completeness, the power is the same; it is the whole. Thought is one system, and lives in every member. When a part in its finitude is taken as the whole, its truer nature breaks through in the form of contradiction, and cannot be satisfied until it renders explicit the fullness and truth against which the imperfect assertion sinned. The imperfect aspects can collide only because they have a proper relation and ought to be reconciled. The dialectic thus is a development of reason from ​within, and its moving force is the implication of the whole in every part and the systematic continuity of the knowable world.

Such then is the general logical standpoint which Hegel adopts, and we shall have to recur to it in our discussion of the method of the other branches of philosophy. At present, however, we must be content with this outline, meagre as it is, and proceed to discuss some of the special principles which the dialectic of logical thought contains.