That evolution demands a union of opposites seems at first paradoxical enough.  To say that Christianity is a religion of both infinity and finitude means nothing less than that it contains a contradiction.  Hegel’s view, strange as it may sound, is just this:  everything includes a contradiction in it, everything is both positive and negative, everything expresses at once its Everlasting Yea and its Everlasting No.  The negative character of the world is the very vehicle of its progress.  Life and activity mean the triumph of the positive over the negative, a triumph which results from absorbing and assimilating it.  The myth of the Phoenix typifies the life of reason “eternally preparing for itself,” as Hegel says, “a funeral pile, and consuming itself upon it; but so that from its ashes it produces the new, renovated, fresh life.”  That the power of negativity enters constitutively into the rationality of the world, nay, that the rationality of the world demands negativity in it, is Hegel’s most original contribution to thought.  His complete philosophy is the attempt to show in detail that the whole universe and everything it contains manifests the process of uniformly struggling with a negative power, and is an outcome of conflicting, but reconciled forces.  An impressionistic picture of the world’s eternal becoming through this process is furnished by the first of Hegel’s great works, the Phenomenology of Spirit.  The book is, in a sense, a cross-section of the entire spiritual world.  It depicts the necessary unfolding of typical phases of the spiritual life of mankind.  Logical categories, scientific laws, historical epochs, literary tendencies, religious processes, social, moral, and artistic institutions, all exemplify the same onward movement through a union of opposites.  There is eternal and total instability everywhere.  But this unrest and instability is of a necessary and uniform nature, according to the one eternally fixed principle which renders the universe as a whole organic and orderly.

Organic Wholeness!  This phrase contains the rationale of the restless flow and the evanescent being of the Hegelian world.  It is but from the point of view of the whole that its countless conflicts, discrepancies, and contradictions can be understood.  As the members of the body find only in the body as a whole their raison d’etre, so the manifold expressions of the world are the expressions of one organism.  A hand which is cut off, as Hegel somewhere remarks, still looks like a hand, and exists; but it is not a real hand.  Similarly any part of the world, severed from its connection with the whole, any isolated historical event, any one religious view, any particular scientific explanation, any single social body, any mere individual person, is like an amputated bodily organ.  Hegel’s view of the world as organic depends upon exhibiting the partial and abstract nature of other views.  In his Phenomenology a