coherences, which are indeed
significant of natural changes, as the march of dialectic itself, thus
identified with the process of evolution and with natural law. The
romance of an unstable and groping theology, full of warm intentions and
impossible ideas, he took to be typical of all experience and of all
science.

In that impressionable age any effect of _chiaro-oscuro_ caught in the
moonlight of history could find a philosopher to exalt it into the
darkly luminous secret of the world. Hegel accordingly decreed that
men's habit of self-contradiction constituted their providential
function, both in thought and in morals; and he devoted his Logic to
showing how every idea they embraced (for he never treated an idea
otherwise than as a creed), when pressed a little, turned into its
opposite. This opposite after a while would fall back into something
like the original illusion; whereupon a new change of insight would
occur and a new thought would be accepted until, the landscape changing,
attention would be attracted to a fresh aspect of the matter and
conviction would wander into a new labyrinth of false steps and
half-meanings. The sum total of these wanderings, when viewed from
above, formed an interesting picture. A half-mystical, half-cynical
reflection might take a certain pleasure in contemplating it; especially
if, in memory of Calvin and the Stoics, this situation were called the
expression of Absolute Reason and Divine Will.

We may think for a moment that we have grasped the elusive secret of
this philosophy and that it is simply a Calvinism without Christianity,
in which God's glory consists in the damnation of quite all his
creatures. Presently, however, the scene changes again, and we recognise
that Creator and creation, ideal and process, are identical, so that the
glory belongs to the very multitude that suffers. But finally, as we rub
our eyes, the whole revelation collapses into a platitude, and we
discover that this glory and this damnation were nothing but unctuous
phrases for the vulgar flux of existence.

That nothing is what we mean by it is perfectly true when we in no case
know what we mean. Thus a man who is a mystic by nature may very well
become one by reflection also. Not knowing what he wants nor what he is,
he may believe that every shift carries him nearer to perfection. A
temperamental and quasi-religious thirst for inconclusiveness and room
to move on lent a certain triumphant note to