ion due to a sense of
error_. Thus bare sensation is abstract and bare thought is abstract.
The real, however, is not merely the concrete in which they are united,
but the very process in the course of which through knowledge of
abstraction thought arrives at the concrete. The principle of negation
is the very life of thought, and it is _the life of thought_, rather
than the outcome of thought, which is reality. The most general form of
the dialectical process contains three moments: the moment of _thesis_,
in which affirmation is made; the moment of _antithesis_, in which the
opposite asserts itself; and the moment of _synthesis_, in which a
reconciliation is effected in a new thesis. Thus thought is the
progressive overcoming of contradiction; not the state of freedom from
contradiction, but the act of escaping it. Such processes are more
familiar in the moral life. Morality consists, so even common-sense
asserts, in the overcoming of evil. Character is the resistance of
temptation; goodness, a growth in grace through discipline. Of such, for
Hegel, is the very kingdom of heaven. It is the task of the philosopher,
a task to which Hegel applies himself most assiduously, to analyze the
battle and the victory upon which spiritual being nourishes itself. And
since the deeper processes are those of thought, the Hegelian philosophy
centres in an ordering of notions, a demonstration of that necessary
progression of thought which, in its whole dynamical logical history,
constitutes the _absolute idea_.

[Sidenote: The Hegelian Philosophy of Nature and History.]

Sect. 180. The Hegelian philosophy, with its emphasis upon difference,
antagonism, and development, is peculiarly qualified to be a philosophy
of nature and history. Those principles of spiritual development which
logic defines are conceived as incarnate in the evolution of the world.
Nature, as the very antithesis to spirit, is now understood to be the
foil of spirit. In nature spirit alienates itself in order to return
enriched. The stages of nature are the preparation for the reviving of a
spirituality that has been deliberately forfeited. The Romanticists,
whether philosophers like Schelling or poets like Goethe and Wordsworth,
were led by their feeling for the beauty of nature to attribute to it a
much deeper and more direct spiritual significance. But Hegel and the
Romanticists alike are truly expressed in Emerson's belief that the
spiritual interpretation of n