Hegel's satire; he was sure
it all culminated in something, and was not sure it did not culminate in
himself. The system, however, as it might strike a less egotistical
reader, is a long demonstration of man's ineptitude and of nature's
contemptuous march over a path paved with good intentions. It is an
idealism without respect for ideals; a system of dialectic in which a
psychological flux (not, of course, psychological science, which would
involve terms dialectically fixed and determinate) is made
systematically to obliterate intended meanings.

[Sidenote: Dialectic expresses a given intent.]

This spirited travesty of logic has enough historical truth in it to
show that dialectic must always stand, so to speak, on its apex; for
life is changeful, and the vision and interest of one moment are not
understood in the next. Theological dialectic rings hollow when once
faith is dead; grammar looks artificial when a language is foreign;
mathematics itself seems shallow when, like Hegel, we have no love for
nature's intelligible mechanism nor for the clear structure and
constancy of eternal things. Ideal philosophy is a flower of the spirit
and varies with the soil. If mathematics suffers so little
contradiction, it is only because the primary aspects of sensation which
it elaborates could not lapse from the world without an utter break in
its continuity. Otherwise though mathematics might not be refuted it
might well be despised, like an obsolete ontology. Its boasted necessity
and universality would not help it at all if experience should change so
much as to present no further mathematical aspect. Those who expect to
pass at death into a non-spatial and super-temporal world, where there
will be no detestable extended and unthinking substances, and nothing
that need be counted, will find their hard-learned mathematics sadly
superfluous there. The memory of earthly geometry and arithmetic will
grow pale amid that floating incense and music, where dialectic, if it
survives at all, will have to busy itself on new intuitions.

So, too, when the landscape changes in the moral world, when new
passions or arts make their appearance, moral philosophy must start
afresh on a new foundation and try to express the ideals involved in the
new pursuits. To this extent experience lends colour to Hegel's
dialectical physics; but he betrayed, like the sincere pantheist he was,
the finite interests that give actual values to the world, an