difference of
its objects. It separates itself from them and so becomes conscious of
them in their separation from one another, while at the same time it
binds them together as elements in one higher self-consciousness.

This seems the very quintessence of thinness; and the matter hardly
grows thicker when we gather, after enormous amounts of reading, that
the great enveloping self in question is absolute reason as such, and
that as such it is characterized by the habit of using certain jejune
'categories' with which to perform its eminent relating work. The
whole active material of natural fact is tried out, and only the
barest intellectualistic formalism remains.

Hegel tried, as we saw, to make the system concreter by making the
relations between things 'dialectic,' but if we turn to those who use
his name most worshipfully, we find them giving up all the particulars
of his attempt, and simply praising his intention--much as in our
manner we have praised it ourselves. Mr. Haldane, for example, in his
wonderfully clever Gifford lectures, praises Hegel to the skies, but
what he tells of him amounts to little more than this, that 'the
categories in which the mind arranges its experiences, and gives
meaning to them, the universals in which the particulars are grasped
in the individual, are a logical chain, in which the first presupposes
the last, and the last is its presupposition and its truth.' He hardly
tries at all to thicken this thin logical scheme. He says indeed
that absolute mind in itself, and absolute mind in its hetereity or
otherness, under the distinction which it sets up of itself from
itself, have as their real _prius_ absolute mind in synthesis; and,
this being absolute mind's true nature, its dialectic character must
show itself in such concrete forms as Goethe's and Wordsworth's
poetry, as well as in religious forms. 'The nature of God, the nature
of absolute mind, is to exhibit the triple movement of dialectic, and
so the nature of God as presented in religion must be a triplicity,
a trinity.' But beyond thus naming Goethe and Wordsworth and
establishing the trinity, Mr. Haldane's Hegelianism carries us hardly
an inch into the concrete detail of the world we actually inhabit.

Equally thin is Mr. Taylor, both in his principles and in their
results. Following Mr. Bradley, he starts by assuring us that reality
cannot be self-contradictory, but to be related to anything really
outside of one's self is