rse upsets our religious attitudes and outlooks. Of no special
system of good attained does the universe recognize the value as
sacred. Down it tumbles, over it goes, to feed the ravenous appetite
for destruction, of the larger system of history in which it stood
for a moment as a landing-place and stepping-stone. This dogging of
everything by its negative, its fate, its undoing, this perpetual
moving on to something future which shall supersede the present,
this is the hegelian intuition of the essential provisionality, and
consequent unreality, of everything empirical and finite. Take any
concrete finite thing and try to hold it fast. You cannot, for so
held, it proves not to be concrete at all, but an arbitrary extract or
abstract which you have made from the remainder of empirical reality.
The rest of things invades and overflows both it and you together,
and defeats your rash attempt. Any partial view whatever of the world
tears the part out of its relations, leaves out some truth concerning
it, is untrue of it, falsifies it. The full truth about anything
involves more than that thing. In the end nothing less than the whole
of everything can be the truth of anything at all.

Taken so far, and taken in the rough, Hegel is not only harmless, but
accurate. There is a dialectic movement in things, if such it please
you to call it, one that the whole constitution of concrete life
establishes; but it is one that can be described and accounted for in
terms of the pluralistic vision of things far more naturally than in
the monistic terms to which Hegel finally reduced it. Pluralistic
empiricism knows that everything is in an environment, a surrounding
world of other things, and that if you leave it to work there it will
inevitably meet with friction and opposition from its neighbors. Its
rivals and enemies will destroy it unless it can buy them off by
compromising some part of its original pretensions.

But Hegel saw this undeniable characteristic of the world we live in
in a non-empirical light. Let the _mental idea_ of the thing work in
your thought all alone, he fancied, and just the same consequences
will follow. It will be negated by the opposite ideas that dog it,
and can survive only by entering, along with them, into some kind
of treaty. This treaty will be an instance of the so-called 'higher
synthesis' of everything with its negative; and Hegel's originality
lay in transporting the process from the sphere of per