nite and the negation of the finite are alike lost in a
higher or positive infinity, and the absolute is the sum or correlation
of all relatives. When this reconciliation of opposites is finally
completed in all its stages, the mind may come back again and review the
things of sense, the opinions of philosophers, the strife of theology
and politics, without being disturbed by them. Whatever is, if not
the very best--and what is the best, who can tell?--is, at any rate,
historical and rational, suitable to its own age, unsuitable to any
other. Nor can any efforts of speculative thinkers or of soldiers and
statesmen materially quicken the 'process of the suns.'

Hegel was quite sensible how great would be the difficulty of presenting
philosophy to mankind under the form of opposites. Most of us live
in the one-sided truth which the understanding offers to us, and
if occasionally we come across difficulties like the time-honoured
controversy of necessity and free-will, or the Eleatic puzzle of
Achilles and the tortoise, we relegate some of them to the sphere of
mystery, others to the book of riddles, and go on our way rejoicing.
Most men (like Aristotle) have been accustomed to regard a contradiction
in terms as the end of strife; to be told that contradiction is the life
and mainspring of the intellectual world is indeed a paradox to them.
Every abstraction is at first the enemy of every other, yet they are
linked together, each with all, in the chain of Being. The struggle for
existence is not confined to the animals, but appears in the kingdom of
thought. The divisions which arise in thought between the physical and
moral and between the moral and intellectual, and the like, are deepened
and widened by the formal logic which elevates the defects of the human
faculties into Laws of Thought; they become a part of the mind which
makes them and is also made up of them. Such distinctions become so
familiar to us that we regard the thing signified by them as absolutely
fixed and defined. These are some of the illusions from which Hegel
delivers us by placing us above ourselves, by teaching us to analyze
the growth of 'what we are pleased to call our minds,' by reverting to
a time when our present distinctions of thought and language had no
existence.

Of the great dislike and childish impatience of his system which would
be aroused among his opponents, he was fully aware, and would often
anticipate the jests which the rest o