no incompleteness,
no opposite, and no need of further development. The Absolute Idea,
therefore, is adequate to describe Absolute Reality; but all lower ideas
only describe reality as it appears to a partial view, not as it is
to one who simultaneously surveys the Whole. Thus Hegel reaches the
conclusion that Absolute Reality forms one single harmonious system, not
in space or time, not in any degree evil, wholly rational, and wholly
spiritual. Any appearance to the contrary, in the world we know, can be
proved logically--so he believes--to be entirely due to our fragmentary
piecemeal view of the universe. If we saw the universe whole, as we may
suppose God sees it, space and time and matter and evil and all striving
and struggling would disappear, and we should see instead an eternal
perfect unchanging spiritual unity.

In this conception, there is undeniably something sublime, something to
which we could wish to yield assent. Nevertheless, when the arguments
in support of it are carefully examined, they appear to involve much
confusion and many unwarrantable assumptions. The fundamental tenet
upon which the system is built up is that what is incomplete must be not
self-subsistent, but must need the support of other things before it can
exist. It is held that whatever has relations to things outside itself
must contain some reference to those outside things in its own nature,
and could not, therefore, be what it is if those outside things did not
exist. A man's nature, for example, is constituted by his memories and
the rest of his knowledge, by his loves and hatreds, and so on; thus,
but for the objects which he knows or loves or hates, he could not be
what he is. He is essentially and obviously a fragment: taken as the
sum-total of reality he would be self-contradictory.

This whole point of view, however, turns upon the notion of the 'nature'
of a thing, which seems to mean 'all the truths about the thing'. It is
of course the case that a truth which connects one thing with another
thing could not subsist if the other thing did not subsist. But a
truth about a thing is not part of the thing itself, although it must,
according to the above usage, be part of the 'nature' of the thing.
If we mean by a thing's 'nature' all the truths about the thing, then
plainly we cannot know a thing's 'nature' unless we know all the thing's
relations to all the other things in the universe. But if the word
'nature' is used in this