ady fed as
it were on its own liability to death, so that, death once dead
for it, there's no more dying then, is the very fulfilment of the
rationalistic aspiration. That one and only whole, with all its
parts involved in it, negating and making one another impossible if
abstracted and taken singly, but necessitating and holding one another
in place if the whole of them be taken integrally, is the literal
ideal sought after; it is the very diagram and picture of that notion
of _the_ truth with no outlying alternative, to which nothing can be
added, nor from it anything withdrawn, and all variations from which
are absurd, which so dominates the human imagination. Once we have
taken in the features of this diagram that so successfully solves
the world-old problem, the older ways of proving the necessity of
judgments cease to give us satisfaction. Hegel's way we think must
be the right way. The true must be essentially the self-reflecting
self-contained recurrent, that which secures itself by including its
own other and negating it; that makes a spherical system with no loose
ends hanging out for foreignness to get a hold upon; that is forever
rounded in and closed, not strung along rectilinearly and open at its
ends like that universe of simply collective or additive form which
Hegel calls the world of the bad infinite, and which is all that
empiricism, starting with simply posited single parts and elements, is
ever able to attain to.

No one can possibly deny the sublimity of this hegelian conception.
It is surely in the grand style, if there be such a thing as a grand
style in philosophy. For us, however, it remains, so far, a merely
formal and diagrammatic conception; for with the actual content
of absolute truth, as Hegel materially tries to set it forth, few
disciples have been satisfied, and I do not propose to refer at all to
the concreter parts of his philosophy. The main thing now is to grasp
the generalized vision, and feel the authority of the abstract scheme
of a statement self-secured by involving double negation. Absolutists
who make no use of Hegel's own technique are really working by his
method. You remember the proofs of the absolute which I instanced in
my last lecture, Lotze's and Royce's proofs by _reductio ad absurdum_,
to the effect that any smallest connexion rashly supposed in things
will logically work out into absolute union, and any minimal
disconnexion into absolute disunion,--these are real