rmanence is more
essential arose early in Greek philosophy. Heraclitus was the first one
to see in change a deeper significance than in the permanence of the
Eleatics. A more dramatic opposition than the one which ensued between
the Heracliteans and the Eleatics can scarcely be imagined--both schools
claiming a monopoly of reason and truth, both distrusting the senses,
and each charging the other with illusion. Now the significance of
Hegel's philosophy can be grasped only when we bear in mind that it was
just this profound distinction between the permanent and the changing
that Hegel sought to understand and to interpret. He saw more deeply
into the reality of movement and change than any other philosopher
before or after him.

Very early in his life, judging by the recently published writings of
his youth, Hegel became interested in various phases of movement and
change. The vicissitudes of his own inner or outer life he did not
analyze. He was not given to introspection. Romanticism and mysticism
were foreign to his nature. His temperament was rather that of the
objective thinker. Not his own passions, hopes, and fears, but those of
others invited his curiosity. With an humane attitude, the young Hegel
approached religious and historical problems. The dramatic life and
death of Jesus, the tragic fate of "the glory that was Greece and the
grandeur that was Rome," the discrepancies between Christ's teachings
and the positive Christian religion, the fall of paganism and the
triumph of the Christian Church--these were the problems over which the
young Hegel pondered. Through an intense study of these problems, he
discovered that evil, sin, longing, and suffering are woven into the
very tissue of religious and historical processes, and that these
negative elements determine the very meaning and progress of history and
religion. Thereupon he began a systematic sketch of a philosophy in
which a negative factor was to be recognized as the positive vehicle in
the development of the whole world. And thus his genius came upon a
method which revealed to him an orderly unfolding in the world with
stages of relative values, the higher developing from the lower, and all
stages constituting an organic whole.

The method which the young Hegel discovered empirically, and which the
mature rationalist applied to every sphere of human life and thought, is
the famous Dialectical Method. This method is, in general, nothing else
than the