s individual.

We have characterized Hegel's system, thirdly, as a philosophy of
development. The point of distinction here is that Hegel carries out with
logical consecutiveness and up to the point of obstinacy the principle
of development which Fichte had discovered, and which Schelling also
had occasionally employed,--the threefold rhythm _thesis, antithesis,
synthesis_. Here we come to Hegel's _dialectic method_. He reached this as
the true method of speculation through a comparison of the two forms of
philosophy which he found dominant at the beginning of his career--the
Illumination culminating in Kant, on the one hand, and, on the other, the
doctrine of identity defended by Schelling and his circle--neither of which
entirely satisfied him.

In regard to the main question he feels himself one with Schelling:
philosophy is to be metaphysics, the science of the absolute and its
immanence in the world, the doctrine of the identity of opposites, of the,
_per se_ of things, not merely of their phenomenon. But the form which
Schelling had given it seems to him unscientific, unsystematic, for
Schelling had based philosophical knowledge on the intuition of genius--and
science from intuition is impossible. The philosophy of the Illumination
impresses him, on the other hand, by the formal strictness of its inquiry;
he agrees with it that philosophy must be science from concepts. Only not
from abstract concepts. Kant and the Illumination stand on the platform
of reflection, for which the antithesis of thought and being, finite and
infinite remains insoluble, and, consequently, the absolute transcendent,
and the true essence of things unknowable. Hegel wishes to combine the
advantages of both sides, the depth of content of the one, and the
scientific form of the other.

The intuition with which Schelling works is immediate cognition, directed
to the concrete and particular. The concept of the philosophy of reflection
is mediate cognition, moving in the sphere of the abstract and universal.
Is it not feasible to do away with the (unscientific) immediateness of the
one, and the (non-intuitive, content-lacking) abstractness of the other,
to combine the concrete with the mediate or conceptual, and in this way
to realize the Kantian ideal of an intuitive understanding? _A concrete
concept_ would be one which sought the universal not without the
particular, but in it; which should not find the infinite beyond the
finite, nor the