Merely as a reporter of certain empirical aspects of the actual, Hegel, then, is great and true.  But he aimed at being something far greater than an empirical reporter, so I must say something about that essential aspect of his thought.  Hegel was dominated by the notion of a truth that should prove incontrovertible, binding on every one, and certain, which should be the truth, one, indivisible, eternal, objective, and necessary, to which all our particular thinking must lead as to its consummation.  This is the dogmatic ideal, the postulate, uncriticised, undoubted, and unchallenged, of all rationalizers in philosophy. ‘I have never doubted,’ a recent Oxford writer says, that truth is universal and single and timeless, a single content or significance, one and whole and complete.[6] Advance in thinking, in the hegelian universe, has, in short, to proceed by the apodictic words must be rather than by those inferior hypothetic words may be, which are all that empiricists can use.

Now Hegel found that his idea of an immanent movement through the field of concepts by way of ‘dialectic’ negation played most beautifully into the hands of this rationalistic demand for something absolute and inconcussum in the way of truth.  It is easy to see how.  If you affirm anything, for example that A is, and simply leave the matter thus, you leave it at the mercy of any one who may supervene and say ‘not A, but B is.’  If he does say so, your statement doesn’t refute him, it simply contradicts him, just as his contradicts you.  The only way of making your affirmation about A self-securing is by getting it into a form which will by implication negate all possible negations in advance.  The mere absence of negation is not enough; it must be present, but present with its fangs drawn.  What you posit as A must already have cancelled the alternative or made it innocuous, by having negated it in advance.  Double negation is the only form of affirmation that fully plays into the hands of the dogmatic ideal.  Simply and innocently affirmative statements are good enough for empiricists, but unfit for rationalist use, lying open as they do to every accidental contradictor, and exposed to every puff of doubt.  The final truth must be something to which there is no imaginable alternative, because it contains all its possible alternatives inside of itself as moments already taken account of and overcome.  Whatever involves its own alternatives as elements of itself is, in a phrase often repeated, its ‘own other,’ made so by the methode der absoluten negativitaet.