variety of interpretations of the world and of the meaning and destiny of life are scrutinized as to their adequacy and concreteness.  When not challenged, the point of view of common sense, for instance, seems concrete and natural.  The reaction of common sense to the world is direct and practical, it has few questions to ask, and philosophic speculations appear to it abstract and barren.  But, upon analysis, it is the common sense view that stands revealed as abstract and barren.  For an abstract object is one that does not fully correspond to the rich and manifold reality; it is incomplete and one-sided.

Precisely such an object is the world of common sense.  Its concreteness is ignorance.  There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by common sense.  Its work-a-day world is not even a faint reflex of the vast and complex universe.  It sees but the immediate, the obvious, the superficial.  So instead of being concrete, it is, in truth, the very opposite.  Nor is empirical science with its predilection for “facts” better off.  Every science able to cope with a mere fragmentary aspect of the world and from a partial point of view, is forced to ignore much of the concrete content of even its own realm.  Likewise, art and religion, though in their views more synthetic and therefore more concrete, are one-sided; they seek to satisfy special needs.  Philosophy alone—­Hegelian philosophy—­is concrete.  Its aim is to interpret the world in its entirety and complexity, its ideal is to harmonize the demands of common sense, the interests of science, the appeal of art, and the longing of religion into one coherent whole.  This view of philosophy, because it deals with the universe in its fulness and variety, alone can make claim to real concreteness.  Nor are the other views false.  They form for Hegel the necessary rungs on the ladder which leads up to his own philosophic vision.  Thus the Hegelian vision is itself an organic process, including all other interpretations of life and of the world as its necessary phases.  In the immanent unfolding of the Hegelian view is epitomized the onward march and the organic unity of the World-Spirit itself.

The technical formulation of this view is contained in his Logic.  This book may indeed be said to be Hegel’s master-stroke.  Nothing less is attempted in it than the proof that the very process of reasoning manifests the same principle of evolution through a union of opposites.  Hegel was well aware, as much as recent exponents of anti-intellectualism, that through “static” concepts we transmute and falsify the “fluent” reality.  As Professor James says “The essence of life is its continuously changing character; but our concepts are all discontinuous and fixed ...  When we conceptualize we cut out and fix, and exclude everything but what we have fixed.  A concept means a that-and-no-other.”  But are our concepts static, fixed, and discontinuous?  What if the very concepts we employ in reasoning should