But while our world is indeed also many, and while, in order to bring 'this aspect of things to light, we must emphasize pluralism, yet the resulting views, taken in their abstrac tion, are as contradictory as are those of mere monism. The many could never co-operate in one world were they not also one.
Thus we cannot reach truth without pass ing through contradictions. For the truth is a synthesis of various points of view. No one of these can be appreciated unless it has first been emphasized. If once emphasized it be comes, however, in its isolation, self-contra dictory, just because it has its truth not in its isolation, but in its relations to the other points of view. But in order to be able to see that these very relations are necessary, and are not merely adventitious and empirical, we must see how the isolated point of view contradicts itself. The sequence of these isolations of special categories (followed by the resulting contradictions, and by the necessary synthesis), constitutes the *dialectic movement of by which the uimmediate* experi ence, with which we begin, is transformed into the system of truth, wherein all the elements appear in necessary interrelations to one another. The principle of this method is what Hegel calls the “Negativity" of thought. The denial, or sublation of imperfect stages of in sight is the only means the perfect -stage can be made explicit. This is the prin ciple of the dialectical method.
The Hegelian theory of the Absolute is the correlate of this theory of the process whereby truth is acquired. For the dialectical method is not only a method of acquiring insight; but, since thought is, in principle, identical with the very life of the universe, the method by which we come to insight is also the very method by which the life of the world is developed. Man is simply the world come to self-consciousness, the Spirit explicitly aware of its own life. This is the obverse aspect .of the thesis that the true Self is the world. Viewed objectively, the Hegelian doctrine accordingly is that the world ground, or "the Spirit," also called the Abso lute, has a life, or activity,, whose forms are expressed in the categories of the 'Logic.' This life has first to manifest itself in experi ence as a world of immediate facts. This im
mediately given outer world constitutes what we call Nature. Such a world has to exist, and to be found by us, in order that the forms of thought should be, not mere forms, but forms expressed in a concrete and immediate way. In life, and especially in rational beings, the thought which is everywhere present in nature reaches a still higher expression, which at last becomes identical with our own insight, as this insight developer through the historical evolution of humanity. The entire world-proc ess is therefore the complete expression of a rational spirit, which indeed eternally possesses self-consciousness, but which, when viewed historically, appears to us as attaining such self consciousness, in individual form, in the re ligious and in the philosophical consciousness of man.
This must suffice as an outline of Hegel's main thoughts. Owing to the interest which he had in viewing the entire course of human history as a series of movements determined by the dialectical processes of which all our life, according to him, consists, Hegel took great interest in the philosophy of history. The influence of his school has been, in consequence, of great importance in affecting the spirit of a great number of modern historical inquiries. The highly ambiguous relations of the Hegelian system to traditional theology proved very momentous for the development of the critical study of religious dogma, and of religious his tory, during the generation after his death. While the original Hegelian school ultimately lost its direct influence in Germany, the in direct influence of the Hegelian system still re mains very great, and is especially noticeable in English and American thought since 1865.
Stirling, 'Secret of Hegel' ; Edward Caird, 'Hegel' in Blackwood's 'Phil osophical Classics> (1883) ; Kuno Fischer, 'History of Modern Philosophy,' (Vol. VIII, trans. into Eng. by T. P. Gordy 1887) ; Rosen kranz, K., 'Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Leiben' (Berlin 1844); Haym, R., 'Hegel und seine Zeit' (ib. 1857) ; McTaggart, 'A Com mentary on Hegel's Logic' (Cambridge 1901) ; and for brief summaries, the various histories of philosophy by Windelband, Thilly, Hoffding and Weber.