ngly confine myself to a few
of the points that captivate beginners most; and assume that if they
break down, so must the system which they prop.

First of all, Hegel has to do utterly away with the sharing and
partaking business he so much loathes. He will not call contradiction
the glue in one place and identity in another; that is too
half-hearted. Contradiction must be a glue universal, and must derive
its credit from being shown to be latently involved in cases that we
hitherto supposed to embody pure continuity. Thus, the relations of an
ego with its objects, of one time with another time, of one place with
another place, of a cause with its effect, of a thing with its
properties, and especially of parts with wholes, must be shown to
involve contradiction. Contradiction, shown to lurk in the very heart
of coherence and continuity, cannot after that be held to defeat them,
and must be taken as the universal solvent,--or, rather, there is no
longer any need of a solvent. To 'dissolve' things in identity was the
dream of earlier cruder schools. Hegel will show that their very
difference is their identity, and that {276} in the act of detachment
the detachment is undone, and they fall into each other's arms.

Now, at the very outset it seems rather odd that a philosopher who
pretends that the world is absolutely rational, or in other words that
it can be completely understood, should fall back on a principle (the
identity of contradictories) which utterly defies understanding, and
obliges him in fact to use the word 'understanding,' whenever it occurs
in his pages, as a term of contempt. Take the case of space we used
above. The common man who looks at space believes there is nothing in
it to be acquainted with beyond what he sees; no hidden machinery, no
secrets, nothing but the parts as they lie side by side and make the
static whole. His intellect is satisfied with accepting space as an
ultimate genus of the given. But Hegel cries to him: "Dupe! dost thou
not see it to be one nest of incompatibilities? Do not the unity of
its wholeness and the diversity of its parts stand in patent
contradiction? Does it not both unite and divide things; and but for
this strange and irreconcilable activity, would it be at all? The
hidden dynamism of self-contradiction is what incessantly produces the
static appearance by which your sense is fooled."

But if the man ask how self-contradiction _can_ do all this, and ho