of time and place
is gathered up into philosophy, and again philosophy clothed in
circumstance expands into history. (iii) Whether regarded as present or
past, under the form of time or of eternity, the spirit of dialectic
is always moving onwards from one determination of thought to another,
receiving each successive system of philosophy and subordinating it to
that which follows--impelled by an irresistible necessity from one idea
to another until the cycle of human thought and existence is complete.
It follows from this that all previous philosophies which are worthy of
the name are not mere opinions or speculations, but stages or moments of
thought which have a necessary place in the world of mind. They are
no longer the last word of philosophy, for another and another has
succeeded them, but they still live and are mighty; in the language of
the Greek poet, 'There is a great God in them, and he grows not old.'
(iv) This vast ideal system is supposed to be based upon experience. At
each step it professes to carry with it the 'witness of eyes and
ears' and of common sense, as well as the internal evidence of its
own consistency; it has a place for every science, and affirms that
no philosophy of a narrower type is capable of comprehending all true
facts.

The Hegelian dialectic may be also described as a movement from the
simple to the complex. Beginning with the generalizations of sense, (1)
passing through ideas of quality, quantity, measure, number, and the
like, (2) ascending from presentations, that is pictorial forms of
sense, to representations in which the picture vanishes and the essence
is detached in thought from the outward form, (3) combining the I and
the not-I, or the subject and object, the natural order of thought is at
last found to include the leading ideas of the sciences and to arrange
them in relation to one another. Abstractions grow together and
again become concrete in a new and higher sense. They also admit
of development from within their own spheres. Everywhere there is
a movement of attraction and repulsion going on--an attraction or
repulsion of ideas of which the physical phenomenon described under a
similar name is a figure. Freedom and necessity, mind and matter, the
continuous and the discrete, cause and effect, are perpetually being
severed from one another in thought, only to be perpetually reunited.
The finite and infinite, the absolute and relative are not really
opposed; the fi