no doubt that the hope of finding
reason to believe such theses as these has been the chief inspiration of
many life-long students of philosophy. This hope, I believe, is vain. It
would seem that knowledge concerning the universe as a whole is not to
be obtained by metaphysics, and that the proposed proofs that, in virtue
of the laws of logic such and such things _must_ exist and such and such
others cannot, are not capable of surviving a critical scrutiny. In
this chapter we shall briefly consider the kind of way in which such
reasoning is attempted, with a view to discovering whether we can hope
that it may be valid.

The great representative, in modern times, of the kind of view which
we wish to examine, was Hegel (1770-1831). Hegel's philosophy is very
difficult, and commentators differ as to the true interpretation of it.
According to the interpretation I shall adopt, which is that of many, if
not most, of the commentators and has the merit of giving an interesting
and important type of philosophy, his main thesis is that everything
short of the Whole is obviously fragmentary, and obviously incapable of
existing without the complement supplied by the rest of the world. Just
as a comparative anatomist, from a single bone, sees what kind of animal
the whole must have been, so the metaphysician, according to Hegel,
sees, from any one piece of reality, what the whole of reality must
be--at least in its large outlines. Every apparently separate piece of
reality has, as it were, hooks which grapple it to the next piece;
the next piece, in turn, has fresh hooks, and so on, until the whole
universe is reconstructed. This essential incompleteness appears,
according to Hegel, equally in the world of thought and in the world of
things. In the world of thought, if we take any idea which is
abstract or incomplete, we find, on examination, that if we forget
its incompleteness, we become involved in contradictions; these
contradictions turn the idea in question into its opposite, or
antithesis; and in order to escape, we have to find a new, less
incomplete idea, which is the synthesis of our original idea and its
antithesis. This new idea, though less incomplete than the idea we
started with, will be found, nevertheless, to be still not wholly
complete, but to pass into its antithesis, with which it must be
combined in a new synthesis. In this way Hegel advances until he reaches
the 'Absolute Idea', which, according to him, has