cepts to that of
concepts and treating it as the universal method by which every kind
of life, logical, physical, or psychological, is mediated. Not to the
sensible facts as such, then, did Hegel point for the secret of what
keeps existence going, but rather to the conceptual way of treating
them. Concepts were not in his eyes the static self-contained things
that previous logicians had supposed, but were germinative, and passed
beyond themselves into each other by what he called their immanent
dialectic. In ignoring each other as they do, they virtually exclude
and deny each other, he thought, and thus in a manner introduce each
other. So the dialectic logic, according to him, had to supersede the
'logic of identity' in which, since Aristotle, all Europe had been
brought up.

This view of concepts is Hegel's revolutionary performance; but so
studiously vague and ambiguous are all his expressions of it that one
can hardly tell whether it is the concepts as such, or the sensible
experiences and elements conceived, that Hegel really means to work
with. The only thing that is certain is that whatever you may say of
his procedure, some one will accuse you of misunderstanding it. I make
no claim to understanding it, I treat it merely impressionistically.

So treating it, I regret that he should have called it by the name of
logic. Clinging as he did to the vision of a really living world, and
refusing to be content with a chopped-up intellectualist picture
of it, it is a pity that he should have adopted the very word that
intellectualism had already pre-empted. But he clung fast to the old
rationalist contempt for the immediately given world of sense and all
its squalid particulars, and never tolerated the notion that the form
of philosophy might be empirical only. His own system had to be a
product of eternal reason, so the word 'logic,' with its suggestions
of coercive necessity, was the only word he could find natural. He
pretended therefore to be using the _a priori_ method, and to be
working by a scanty equipment of ancient logical terms--position,
negation, reflection, universal, particular, individual, and the like.
But what he really worked by was his own empirical perceptions, which
exceeded and overflowed his miserably insufficient logical categories
in every instance of their use.

What he did with the category of negation was his most original
stroke. The orthodox opinion is that you can advance logically thro