thing are the same, so logic is the theory of thought and of being in one.  Its three principal divisions are entitled Being, Essence, the Concept.  The first of these discusses quality, quantity, and measure or qualitative quantum.  The second considers essence as such, appearance, and (essence appearing or) actuality, and this last, in turn, in the moments, substantiality, causality, and reciprocity.  The third part is divided into the sections, subjectivity (concept, judgment, syllogism), objectivity (mechanism, chemism, teleology), and the Idea (life, cognition, the absolute Idea).

As a specimen of the way in which Hegel makes the concept pass over into its opposite and unite with this in a synthesis, it will be sufficient to cite the famous beginning of the Logic.  How must the absolute first be thought, how first defined?  Evidently as that which is absolutely without presupposition.  The most general concept which remains after abstracting from every determinate content of thought, and from which no further abstraction is possible, the most indeterminate and immediate concept, is pure being.  As without quality and content it is equivalent to nothing.  In thinking pure being we have rather cogitated nothing; but this in turn cannot be retained as final, but passes back into being, for in being thought it exists as a something thought.  Pure being and pure nothing are the same, although we mean different things by them; both are absolute indeterminateness.  The transition from being to nothing and from nothing to being is becoming.  Becoming is the unity, and hence the truth of both.  When the boy is “becoming” a youth he is, and at the same time is not, a youth.  Being and not-being are so mediated and sublated in becoming that they are no longer contradictory.  In a similar way it is further shown that quality and quantity are reciprocally dependent and united in measure (which may be popularly illustrated thus:  progressively diminishing heat becomes cold, distances cannot be measured in bushels); that essence and phenomenon are mutually inseparable, inasmuch as the latter is always the appearance of an essence, and the former is essence only as it manifests itself in the phenomenon, etc.

The significance of the Hegelian logic depends less on its ingenious and valuable explanations of particulars than on the fundamental idea, that the categories do not form an unordered heap, but a great organically connected whole, in which each member occupies its determinate position, and is related to every other by gradations of kinship and subordination.  This purpose to construct a globus of the pure concepts was itself a mighty feat, which is assured of the continued admiration of posterity notwithstanding the failure in execution.  He who shall one day take it up again will draw many a lesson from Hegel’s unsuccessful attempt.  Before all, the connections between the concepts are too manifold and complex for the monotonous transitions of this dialectic method (which Chalybaeus wittily called articular disease) to be capable of doing them justice.  Again, the productive force of thought must not be neglected, and to it, rather than to the mobility of the categories themselves, the matter of the transition from one to the other must be transferred.