It is still more curious in that these same disciples, altho they are usually willing to abandon any particular instance of the dialectic method to its critics, are unshakably sure that in some shape the dialectic method is the key to truth.  What, then, is the dialectic method?  It is itself a part of the hegelian vision or intuition, and a part that finds the strongest echo in empiricism and common sense.  Great injustice is done to Hegel by treating him as primarily a reasoner.  He is in reality a naively observant man, only beset with a perverse preference for the use of technical and logical jargon.  He plants himself in the empirical flux of things and gets the impression of what happens.  His mind is in very truth impressionistic; and his thought, when once you put yourself at the animating centre of it, is the easiest thing in the world to catch the pulse of and to follow.

Any author is easy if you can catch the centre of his vision.  From the centre in Hegel come those towering sentences of his that are comparable only to Luther’s, as where, speaking of the ontological proof of God’s existence from the concept of him as the ens perfectissimum to which no attribute can be lacking, he says:  ’It would be strange if the Notion, the very heart of the mind, or, in a word, the concrete totality we call God, were not rich enough to embrace so poor a category as Being, the very poorest and most abstract of all—­for nothing can be more insignificant than Being.’  But if Hegel’s central thought is easy to catch, his abominable habits of speech make his application of it to details exceedingly difficult to follow.  His passion for the slipshod in the way of sentences, his unprincipled playing fast and loose with terms; his dreadful vocabulary, calling what completes a thing its ‘negation,’ for example; his systematic refusal to let you know whether he is talking logic or physics or psychology, his whole deliberately adopted policy of ambiguity and vagueness, in short:  all these things make his present-day readers wish to tear their hair—­or his—­out in desperation.  Like Byron’s corsair, he has left a name ’to other times, linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes.’

The virtue was the vision, which was really in two parts.  The first part was that reason is all-inclusive, the second was that things are ‘dialectic.’  Let me say a word about this second part of Hegel’s vision.

The impression that any naif person gets who plants himself innocently in the flux of things is that things are off their balance.  Whatever equilibriums our finite experiences attain to are but provisional.  Martinique volcanoes shatter our wordsworthian equilibrium with nature.  Accidents, either moral, mental, or physical, break up the slowly built-up equilibriums men reach in family life and in their civic and professional relations.  Intellectual enigmas frustrate our scientific systems, and the ultimate cruelty of the