not find the infinite beyond the finite, nor the absolute at an unattainable distance above the world, nor the essence hidden behind the phenomenon, but manifesting itself therein.  If the philosophy of reflection, in the abstract lifelessness of its concepts, looked on opposites as incapable of sublation, and Schelling regarded them as immediately identical, if the former denied the identity of opposites, and the latter maintained it primordially given (in the absolute indifference which is to be grasped by intuition), the concrete concept secures the identity of opposites through self-mediation, their passing over into it; it teaches us to know the identity as the result of a process.  First immediate unity, then divergence of opposites, and, finally, reconciliation of opposites—­this is the universal law of all development.

The conflict between the philosophy of reflection and the philosophy of intuition, which Hegel endeavors to terminate by a speculation at once conceptual and concrete, concerns (1) the organ of thought, (2) the object of thought, (3) the nature and logical dignity of the contradiction.

The organ of the true philosophy is neither the abstract reflective understanding, which finds itself shut up within the limits of the phenomenal, nor mystical intuition, which expects by a quick leap to gain the summit of knowledge concerning the absolute, but reason as the faculty of concrete concepts.  That concept is concrete which does not assume an attitude of cold repulsion toward its contrary, but seeks self-mediation with the latter, and moves from thesis through antithesis, and with it, to synthesis.  Reason neither fixes the opposites nor denies them, but has them become identical.  The unity of opposites is neither impossible nor present from the first, but the result of a development.

The object of philosophy is not the phenomenal world or the relative, but the absolute, and this not as passive substance, but as living subject, which divides into distinctions, and returns from them to identity, which develops through the opposites.  The absolute is a process, and all that is real the manifestation of this process.  If science is to correspond to reality, it also must be a process.  Philosophy is thought-movement (dialectic); it is a system of concepts, each of which passes over into its successor, puts its successor forth from itself, just as it has been generated by its predecessor.

All reality is development, and the motive force in this development (of the world as well as of science) is opposition, contradiction.  Without this there would be no movement and no life.  Thus all reality is full of contradiction, and yet rational.  The contradiction is not that which is entirely alogical, but it is a spur to further thinking.  It must not be annulled, but “sublated” (aufgehoben), i.e._, at once negated and conserved.  This is effected by thinking the contradictory concepts