omething about that
essential aspect of his thought. Hegel was dominated by the notion of
a truth that should prove incontrovertible, binding on every one,
and certain, which should be _the_ truth, one, indivisible, eternal,
objective, and necessary, to which all our particular thinking
must lead as to its consummation. This is the dogmatic ideal,
the postulate, uncriticised, undoubted, and unchallenged, of all
rationalizers in philosophy. '_I have never doubted_,' a recent Oxford
writer says, that truth is universal and single and timeless, a single
content or significance, one and whole and complete.[6] Advance in
thinking, in the hegelian universe, has, in short, to proceed by the
apodictic words _must be_ rather than by those inferior hypothetic
words _may be_, which are all that empiricists can use.

Now Hegel found that his idea of an immanent movement through
the field of concepts by way of 'dialectic' negation played most
beautifully into the hands of this rationalistic demand for something
absolute and _inconcussum_ in the way of truth. It is easy to see how.
If you affirm anything, for example that A is, and simply leave the
matter thus, you leave it at the mercy of any one who may supervene
and say 'not A, but B is.' If he does say so, your statement doesn't
refute him, it simply contradicts him, just as his contradicts you.
The only way of making your affirmation about A _self-securing_ is by
getting it into a form which will by implication negate all possible
negations in advance. The mere absence of negation is not enough; it
must be present, but present with its fangs drawn. What you posit as A
must already have cancelled the alternative or made it innocuous, by
having negated it in advance. Double negation is the only form of
affirmation that fully plays into the hands of the dogmatic ideal.
Simply and innocently affirmative statements are good enough for
empiricists, but unfit for rationalist use, lying open as they do to
every accidental contradictor, and exposed to every puff of doubt.
The _final_ truth must be something to which there is no imaginable
alternative, because it contains all its possible alternatives inside
of itself as moments already taken account of and overcome. Whatever
involves its own alternatives as elements of itself is, in a phrase
often repeated, its 'own other,' made so by the _methode der absoluten
negativitaet_.

Formally, this scheme of an organism of truth that has alre