analysis of one and
Being.

It is difficult within the compass of a few pages to give even a
faint outline of the Hegelian dialectic. No philosophy which is worth
understanding can be understood in a moment; common sense will not teach
us metaphysics any more than mathematics. If all sciences demand of us
protracted study and attention, the highest of all can hardly be matter
of immediate intuition. Neither can we appreciate a great system without
yielding a half assent to it--like flies we are caught in the spider's
web; and we can only judge of it truly when we place ourselves at a
distance from it. Of all philosophies Hegelianism is the most obscure:
and the difficulty inherent in the subject is increased by the use of
a technical language. The saying of Socrates respecting the writings of
Heracleitus--'Noble is that which I understand, and that which I do not
understand may be as noble; but the strength of a Delian diver is needed
to swim through it'--expresses the feeling with which the reader rises
from the perusal of Hegel. We may truly apply to him the words in which
Plato describes the Pre-Socratic philosophers: 'He went on his way
rather regardless of whether we understood him or not'; or, as he is
reported himself to have said of his own pupils: 'There is only one of
you who understands me, and he does NOT understand me.'

Nevertheless the consideration of a few general aspects of the Hegelian
philosophy may help to dispel some errors and to awaken an interest
about it. (i) It is an ideal philosophy which, in popular phraseology,
maintains not matter but mind to be the truth of things, and this not by
a mere crude substitution of one word for another, but by showing
either of them to be the complement of the other. Both are creations of
thought, and the difference in kind which seems to divide them may also
be regarded as a difference of degree. One is to the other as the real
to the ideal, and both may be conceived together under the higher form
of the notion. (ii) Under another aspect it views all the forms of sense
and knowledge as stages of thought which have always existed implicitly
and unconsciously, and to which the mind of the world, gradually
disengaged from sense, has become awakened. The present has been the
past. The succession in time of human ideas is also the eternal 'now';
it is historical and also a divine ideal. The history of philosophy
stripped of personality and of the other accidents