The range and general intention of the Hegelian doctrine are thus suggested although, owing to the vast range of his undertaking, this can here be done only in a very inadequate way. Further characteristics of the philosopher are especially (1) his °dialectical and (2) his theory of the Absolute.
By the dialectical method Hegel means a procedure of which some of the dialogues of Plato give us classical instances, and which Kant's as well as Fichte's method of procedure in philosophy had ex emplified, although the systematic use of the method in Hegel's way is due to his own initia tive. Truth, according to Hegel, comes to us, in the first place, through the medium of °im mediate° experience. Without such experience, we could indeed proceed no further on the way toward insight; and this is the permanent jus tification for °empiricism° in philosophy, if only we observe that this barely immediate ex perience, although indispensable, remains mean ingless unless we transform experience through the activity of our thought. Thought begins by observing that immediate experience, taken merely as it comes, is, so far, not yet intelligible. The first work of our thought is therefore to classify, to divide, to fix upon distinct aspects of facts, to form generalizations and so to con vert what comes to us as immediate into the abstract form of our various Gedanken, or con ceptual constructions. This is, so far, the work of °the Understanding" Such work first re sults in our regarding truth as something which, on the one hand, is fixed, universal, and abstract, while, on the other hand, this world of truth also appears to us to be a world of infinitely various special truths, which relate now to this and now to that individual thing, or fact, or law. So far as our understanding dwells upon the fixity, the universality, the ab stract generality of its truths, it finds, or end lessly seeks to find unity in the world. But so far as the understanding, even in this very effort to discover unity, singles out now this and now that fact or law, it is confronted by the variety of the results which it reaches. There results the well-known problem of One and the Many.* In consequence, the un derstanding is involved in contradictions which are simply inevitable. In the world of the understanding, aeverything is self-oontradic tory,D and is so just because the understanding makes formal consistency the one test of truth, even at the when it expresses its search for truth in the form of an effort (1) to divide what is inseparable, and (2) to substitute abstractions for life.
The forms which the resulting contradic tions assume are well known in the history of philosophy. The interest in abstract unity is shown in extreme form in the Eleatic reduc tion of the whole world to a simple One Being, contrast with which all variety is illusory. The Atomistic thesis, which reduces all the qualitative variety of nature to quantitative differences, the material substance of Descartes, whose only attribute is extension, the sole sub stance of Spinoza,— these are also consequences of the tendency to understand variety by re ducing it to an abstract and lifeless unity. On the other hand an equally abstract pluralism, in all the earlier stages of philosophical thought, has emphasized variety, with the re sult of making it inconceivable how the facts, when regarded as thus mutually isolated, could conspire to make a world at all. Views of one type have, by their very contradictions, led over to views of the opposed type.
The solution of all such difficulties lies in reducing the contradictions to their °ground,'" which hes in the very of thought itself. For the truth of such views lies in their synthesis, not in their mere conflict. Such a synthesis is furnished by the discovery that the search for unity and the interest in di versity and variety are but ((aspects° or "ma ments" of that life of self-comprehension in which the very nature of reason consists. When- thought, by virtue of a deeper reflection upon the contradictions of the understanding, has reached this higher stage of the reason proper, it therefore views the successive op posing views as inevitably one-sided expres sions of different aspects of our rational in terest. Our world is indeed one; and in order to bring this fact to our consciousness, we have, upon the stage of the understanding, to em phasize this very aspect of Being and of the life of our own thought to such an extent as to isolate, by our abstraction, the upon which we then dwell, from the very variety of which it is the unity. Now unless we pass through the stage of doing this we should never bring the unity of things to light at all, but should leave this aspect of the "imme diate' lost in the original obscurity in which, apart from thought, all experience is involved. But so long as we remain upon this stage of abstract reflection, we nevertheless inevitably contradict both experience and ourselves. For experience is of the many, as well as of the unity. And an abstract unity, which is the unity of nothing, is indeed a self-contradiction.