together in a third higher, more comprehensive, and richer concept, whose moments they then form.  As sublated moments they contradict each other no longer; the opposition or contradiction is overcome.  But the synthesis is still not a final one; the play begins anew; again an opposition makes its appearance, which in turn seeks to be overcome, etc.  Each separate concept is one-sided, defective, represents only a part of the truth, needs to be supplemented by its contrary, and, by its union with this, its complement, yields a higher concept, which comes nearer to the whole truth, but still does not quite reach it.  Even the last and richest concept—­the absolute Idea—­is by itself alone not the full truth; the result implies the whole development through which it has been attained.  It is only at the end of such a dialectic of concepts that philosophy reaches complete correspondence with the living reality, which it has to comprehend; and the speculative progress of thought is no capricious sporting with concepts on the part of the thinking subject, but the adequate expression of the movement of the matter itself.  Since the world and its ground is development, it can only be known through a development of concepts.  The law which this follows, in little as in great, is the advance from position to opposition, and thence to combination.  The most comprehensive example of this triad—­Idea, Nature, Spirit—­gives the division of the system; the second—­Subjective, Objective, Absolute Spirit—­determines the articulation of the third part.

%2.  The System.%

Hegel began with a Phenomenology by way of introduction, in which (not to start, like the school of Schelling, with absolute knowledge “as though shot from a pistol”) he describes the genesis of philosophical cognition with an attractive mingling of psychological and philosophico-historical points of view.  He makes spirit—­the universal world-spirit as well as the individual consciousness, which repeats in brief the stages in the development of humanity—­pass through six stadia, of which the first three (consciousness, self-consciousness, reason) correspond to the progress of the intermediate part of the Doctrine of Subjective Spirit, which is entitled Phaenomenologie, and the others (ethical spirit, religion, and absolute knowledge) give an abbreviated presentation of that which the Doctrine of Objective and Absolute Spirit develops in richer articulation.

%(a) Logic% considers the Idea in the abstract element of thought, only as it is thought, and not yet as it is intuited, nor as it thinks itself; its content is the truth as it is without a veil in and for itself, or God in his eternal essence before the creation of the world.  Unlike common logic, which is merely formal, separating form and content, speculative logic, which is at the same time ontology or metaphysics, treats the categories as real relations, the forms of thought as forms of reality:  as thought and