absolute at an unattainable distance above the world, nor
the essence hidden behind the phenomenon, but manifesting itself therein.
If the philosophy of reflection, in the abstract lifelessness of its
concepts, looked on opposites as incapable of sublation, and Schelling
regarded them as immediately identical, if the former denied the identity
of opposites, and the latter maintained it primordially given (in the
absolute indifference which is to be grasped by intuition), the concrete
concept secures the identity of _opposites through self-mediation_, their
passing over into it; it teaches us to know the identity as the result of a
process. First immediate unity, then divergence of opposites, and, finally,
reconciliation of opposites--this is the universal law of all development.

The conflict between the philosophy of reflection and the philosophy of
intuition, which Hegel endeavors to terminate by a speculation at once
conceptual and concrete, concerns (1) the organ of thought, (2) the object
of thought, (3) the nature and logical dignity of the contradiction.

The organ of the true philosophy is neither the abstract reflective
understanding, which finds itself shut up within the limits of the
phenomenal, nor mystical intuition, which expects by a quick leap to gain
the summit of knowledge concerning the absolute, but reason as the faculty
of concrete concepts. That concept is concrete which does not assume an
attitude of cold repulsion toward its contrary, but seeks self-mediation
with the latter, and moves from thesis through antithesis, and with it, to
synthesis. Reason neither fixes the opposites nor denies them, but has them
become identical. The unity of opposites is neither impossible nor present
from the first, but the result of a development.

The object of philosophy is not the phenomenal world or the relative, but
the absolute, and this not as passive substance, but as living subject,
which divides into distinctions, and returns from them to identity, which
develops through the opposites. The absolute is a process, and all that
is real the manifestation of this process. If science is to correspond
to reality, it also must be a process. Philosophy is thought-movement
(dialectic); it is a system of concepts, each of which passes over into
its successor, puts its successor forth from itself, just as it has been
generated by its predecessor.

All reality is development, and the motive force in this development