which takes place within its inner constitution.
And all logical categories, inevitably used in describing and
explaining our world, form one system of interdependent and
organically related parts. Hegel begins with an analysis of a concept
that most abstractly describes reality, follows it through its
countless conflicts and contradictions, and finally reaches the
highest category which, including all the foregoing categories in
organic unity, is alone adequate to characterize the universe as an
organism. What these categories are and what Hegel's procedure is in
showing their necessary sequential development, can here not even be
hinted at.

That the logical development of the categories of thought is the same as
the historical evolution of life--and _vice versa_--establishes for
Hegel the identity of thought and reality. In the history of philosophy,
the discrepancy between thought and reality has often been emphasized.
There are those who insist that reality is too vast and too deep for man
with his limited vision to penetrate; others, again, who set only
certain bounds to man's understanding, reality consisting, they hold, of
knowable and unknowable parts; and others still who see in the very
shifts and changes of philosophic and scientific opinion the delusion of
reason and the illusiveness of reality. The history of thought certainly
does present an array of conflicting views concerning the limits of
human reason. But all the contradictions and conflicts of thought prove
to Hegel the sovereignty of reason. The conflicts of reason are its own
necessary processes and expressions. Its dialectic instability is
instability that is peculiar to all reality. Both thought and reality
manifest one nature and one process. Hence reason with its "dynamic"
categories can comprehend the "fluent" reality, because it is flesh of
its flesh and bone of its bone. Hegel's bold and oft quoted words "What
is rational is real; and what is real is rational," pithily express his
whole doctrine. The nature of rationality and the nature of reality are,
for Hegel, one and the same spiritual process, the organic process of
triumphing over and conquering conflicts and contradictions. Where
reality conforms to this process it is rational (that which does not
conform to it is not reality at all, but has, like an amputated leg,
mere contingent existence); the logical formula of this process is but
an abstract account of what reality is in its es