Very early in his life, judging by the recently published writings of his youth, Hegel became interested in various phases of movement and change.  The vicissitudes of his own inner or outer life he did not analyze.  He was not given to introspection.  Romanticism and mysticism were foreign to his nature.  His temperament was rather that of the objective thinker.  Not his own passions, hopes, and fears, but those of others invited his curiosity.  With an humane attitude, the young Hegel approached religious and historical problems.  The dramatic life and death of Jesus, the tragic fate of “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome,” the discrepancies between Christ’s teachings and the positive Christian religion, the fall of paganism and the triumph of the Christian Church—­these were the problems over which the young Hegel pondered.  Through an intense study of these problems, he discovered that evil, sin, longing, and suffering are woven into the very tissue of religious and historical processes, and that these negative elements determine the very meaning and progress of history and religion.  Thereupon he began a systematic sketch of a philosophy in which a negative factor was to be recognized as the positive vehicle in the development of the whole world.  And thus his genius came upon a method which revealed to him an orderly unfolding in the world with stages of relative values, the higher developing from the lower, and all stages constituting an organic whole.

The method which the young Hegel discovered empirically, and which the mature rationalist applied to every sphere of human life and thought, is the famous Dialectical Method.  This method is, in general, nothing else than the recognition of the necessary presence of a negative factor in the constitution of the world.  Everything in the world—­be it a religious cult or a logical category, a human passion or a scientific law—­is, so Hegel holds, the result of a process which involves the overcoming of a negative element.  Without such an element to overcome, the world would indeed be an inert and irrational affair.  That any rational and worthy activity entails the encounter of opposition and the removal of obstacles is an observation commonplace enough.  A preestablished harmony of foreseen happy issues—­a fool’s paradise—­is scarcely our ideal of a rational world.  Just as a game is not worth playing when its result is predetermined by the great inferiority of the opponent, so life without something negative to overcome loses its zest.  But the process of overcoming is not anything contingent; it operates according to a uniform and universal law.  And this law constitutes Hegel’s most central doctrine—­his doctrine of Evolution.