d simply, as I have done hitherto.

Empirical instances of the way in which higher unities reconcile
contradictions are innumerable, so here again Hegel's vision, taken
merely impressionistically, agrees with countless facts. Somehow life
does, out of its total resources, find ways of satisfying opposites
at once. This is precisely the paradoxical aspect which much of our
civilization presents. Peace we secure by armaments, liberty by laws
and constitutions; simplicity and naturalness are the consummate
result of artificial breeding and training; health, strength, and
wealth are increased only by lavish use, expense, and wear. Our
mistrust of mistrust engenders our commercial system of credit; our
tolerance of anarchistic and revolutionary utterances is the only way
of lessening their danger; our charity has to say no to beggars in
order not to defeat its own desires; the true epicurean has to observe
great sobriety; the way to certainty lies through radical doubt;
virtue signifies not innocence but the knowledge of sin and its
overcoming; by obeying nature, we command her, etc. The ethical and
the religious life are full of such contradictions held in solution.
You hate your enemy?--well, forgive him, and thereby heap coals of
fire on his head; to realize yourself, renounce yourself; to save your
soul, first lose it; in short, die to live.

From such massive examples one easily generalizes Hegel's vision.
Roughly, his 'dialectic' picture is a fair account of a good deal of
the world. It sounds paradoxical, but whenever you once place yourself
at the point of view; of any higher synthesis, you see exactly how
it does in a fashion take up opposites into itself. As an example,
consider the conflict between our carnivorous appetites and hunting
instincts and the sympathy with animals which our refinement is
bringing in its train. We have found how to reconcile these opposites
most effectively by establishing game-laws and close seasons and by
keeping domestic herds. The creatures preserved thus are preserved for
the sake of slaughter, truly, but if not preserved for that reason,
not one of them would be alive at all. Their will to live and our
will to kill them thus harmoniously combine in this peculiar higher
synthesis of domestication.

Merely as a reporter of certain empirical aspects of the actual,
Hegel, then, is great and true. But he aimed at being something far
greater than an empirical reporter, so I must say s