Hegel tried, as we saw, to make the system concreter by making the relations between things ‘dialectic,’ but if we turn to those who use his name most worshipfully, we find them giving up all the particulars of his attempt, and simply praising his intention—­much as in our manner we have praised it ourselves.  Mr. Haldane, for example, in his wonderfully clever Gifford lectures, praises Hegel to the skies, but what he tells of him amounts to little more than this, that ’the categories in which the mind arranges its experiences, and gives meaning to them, the universals in which the particulars are grasped in the individual, are a logical chain, in which the first presupposes the last, and the last is its presupposition and its truth.’  He hardly tries at all to thicken this thin logical scheme.  He says indeed that absolute mind in itself, and absolute mind in its hetereity or otherness, under the distinction which it sets up of itself from itself, have as their real prius absolute mind in synthesis; and, this being absolute mind’s true nature, its dialectic character must show itself in such concrete forms as Goethe’s and Wordsworth’s poetry, as well as in religious forms.  ’The nature of God, the nature of absolute mind, is to exhibit the triple movement of dialectic, and so the nature of God as presented in religion must be a triplicity, a trinity.’  But beyond thus naming Goethe and Wordsworth and establishing the trinity, Mr. Haldane’s Hegelianism carries us hardly an inch into the concrete detail of the world we actually inhabit.

Equally thin is Mr. Taylor, both in his principles and in their results.  Following Mr. Bradley, he starts by assuring us that reality cannot be self-contradictory, but to be related to anything really outside of one’s self is to be self-contradictory, so the ultimate reality must be a single all-inclusive systematic whole.  Yet all he can say of this whole at the end of his excellently written book is that the notion of it ’can make no addition to our information and can of itself supply no motives for practical endeavor.’

Mr. McTaggart treats us to almost as thin a fare.  ’The main practical interest of Hegel’s philosophy,’ he says, ’is to be found in the abstract certainty which the logic gives us that all reality is rational and righteous, even when we cannot see in the least how it is so....  Not that it shows us how the facts around us are good, not that it shows us how we can make them better, but that it proves that they, like other reality, are sub specie eternitatis, perfectly good, and sub specie temporis, destined to become perfectly good.’