he greatest
extension and the least comprehension. Of all words they may be truly
said to be the most inflated with a false meaning. They have been
handed down from one philosopher to another until they have acquired a
religious character. They seem also to derive a sacredness from their
association with the Divine Being. Yet they are the poorest of the
predicates under which we describe him--signifying no more than this,
that he is not finite, that he is not relative, and tending to obscure
his higher attributes of wisdom, goodness, truth.

The system of Hegel frees the mind from the dominion of abstract ideas.
We acknowledge his originality, and some of us delight to wander in the
mazes of thought which he has opened to us. For Hegel has found admirers
in England and Scotland when his popularity in Germany has departed, and
he, like the philosophers whom he criticizes, is of the past. No other
thinker has ever dissected the human mind with equal patience and
minuteness. He has lightened the burden of thought because he has shown
us that the chains which we wear are of our own forging. To be able to
place ourselves not only above the opinions of men but above their
modes of thinking, is a great height of philosophy. This dearly obtained
freedom, however, we are not disposed to part with, or to allow him to
build up in a new form the 'beggarly elements' of scholastic logic
which he has thrown down. So far as they are aids to reflection and
expression, forms of thought are useful, but no further:--we may easily
have too many of them.

And when we are asked to believe the Hegelian to be the sole or
universal logic, we naturally reply that there are other ways in which
our ideas may be connected. The triplets of Hegel, the division into
being, essence, and notion, are not the only or necessary modes in which
the world of thought can be conceived. There may be an evolution by
degrees as well as by opposites. The word 'continuity' suggests the
possibility of resolving all differences into differences of quantity.
Again, the opposites themselves may vary from the least degree of
diversity up to contradictory opposition. They are not like numbers
and figures, always and everywhere of the same value. And therefore
the edifice which is constructed out of them has merely an imaginary
symmetry, and is really irregular and out of proportion. The spirit of
Hegelian criticism should be applied to his own system, and the terms
Being