ch results from absorbing and assimilating it. The myth of
the Phoenix typifies the life of reason "eternally preparing for
itself," as Hegel says, "a funeral pile, and consuming itself upon it;
but so that from its ashes it produces the new, renovated, fresh life."
That the power of negativity enters constitutively into the rationality
of the world, nay, that the rationality of the world demands negativity
in it, is Hegel's most original contribution to thought. His complete
philosophy is the attempt to show in detail that the whole universe and
everything it contains manifests the process of uniformly struggling
with a negative power, and is an outcome of conflicting, but reconciled
forces. An impressionistic picture of the world's eternal becoming
through this process is furnished by the first of Hegel's great works,
the _Phenomenology of Spirit_. The book is, in a sense, a cross-section
of the entire spiritual world. It depicts the necessary unfolding of
typical phases of the spiritual life of mankind. Logical categories,
scientific laws, historical epochs, literary tendencies, religious
processes, social, moral, and artistic institutions, all exemplify the
same onward movement through a union of opposites. There is eternal and
total instability everywhere. But this unrest and instability is of a
necessary and uniform nature, according to the one eternally fixed
principle which renders the universe as a whole organic and orderly.

Organic Wholeness! This phrase contains the rationale of the restless
flow and the evanescent being of the Hegelian world. It is but from the
point of view of the whole that its countless conflicts, discrepancies,
and contradictions can be understood. As the members of the body find
only in the body as a whole their _raison d'etre_, so the manifold
expressions of the world are the expressions of one organism. A hand
which is cut off, as Hegel somewhere remarks, still looks like a hand,
and exists; but it is not a real hand. Similarly any part of the world,
severed from its connection with the whole, any isolated historical
event, any one religious view, any particular scientific explanation,
any single social body, any mere individual person, is like an amputated
bodily organ. Hegel's view of the world as organic depends upon
exhibiting the partial and abstract nature of other views. In his
_Phenomenology_ a variety of interpretations of the world and of the
meaning and destiny of life are