universe upsets our religious attitudes and outlooks.  Of no special system of good attained does the universe recognize the value as sacred.  Down it tumbles, over it goes, to feed the ravenous appetite for destruction, of the larger system of history in which it stood for a moment as a landing-place and stepping-stone.  This dogging of everything by its negative, its fate, its undoing, this perpetual moving on to something future which shall supersede the present, this is the hegelian intuition of the essential provisionality, and consequent unreality, of everything empirical and finite.  Take any concrete finite thing and try to hold it fast.  You cannot, for so held, it proves not to be concrete at all, but an arbitrary extract or abstract which you have made from the remainder of empirical reality.  The rest of things invades and overflows both it and you together, and defeats your rash attempt.  Any partial view whatever of the world tears the part out of its relations, leaves out some truth concerning it, is untrue of it, falsifies it.  The full truth about anything involves more than that thing.  In the end nothing less than the whole of everything can be the truth of anything at all.

Taken so far, and taken in the rough, Hegel is not only harmless, but accurate.  There is a dialectic movement in things, if such it please you to call it, one that the whole constitution of concrete life establishes; but it is one that can be described and accounted for in terms of the pluralistic vision of things far more naturally than in the monistic terms to which Hegel finally reduced it.  Pluralistic empiricism knows that everything is in an environment, a surrounding world of other things, and that if you leave it to work there it will inevitably meet with friction and opposition from its neighbors.  Its rivals and enemies will destroy it unless it can buy them off by compromising some part of its original pretensions.

But Hegel saw this undeniable characteristic of the world we live in in a non-empirical light.  Let the mental idea of the thing work in your thought all alone, he fancied, and just the same consequences will follow.  It will be negated by the opposite ideas that dog it, and can survive only by entering, along with them, into some kind of treaty.  This treaty will be an instance of the so-called ’higher synthesis’ of everything with its negative; and Hegel’s originality lay in transporting the process from the sphere of percepts to that of concepts and treating it as the universal method by which every kind of life, logical, physical, or psychological, is mediated.  Not to the sensible facts as such, then, did Hegel point for the secret of what keeps existence going, but rather to the conceptual way of treating them.  Concepts were not in his eyes the static self-contained things that previous logicians had supposed, but were germinative, and passed beyond themselves into each other by what he called their immanent dialectic.  In ignoring each other as they do, they virtually exclude and deny each other, he thought, and thus in a manner introduce each other.  So the dialectic logic, according to him, had to supersede the ‘logic of identity’ in which, since Aristotle, all Europe had been brought up.