Of these, the second is divided into the natural sciences, commonly so called; so that in its more detailed form the series runs thus:—­Logic, Mechanics, Physics, Organic Physics, Psychology.

Now, if we believe with Hegel, first, that thought is the true essence of man; second, that thought is the essence of the world; and that, therefore, there is nothing but thought; his classification, beginning with the science of pure thought, may be acceptable.  But otherwise, it is an obvious objection to his arrangement, that thought implies things thought of—­that there can be no logical forms without the substance of experience—­that the science of ideas and the science of things must have a simultaneous origin.  Hegel, however, anticipates this objection, and, in his obstinate idealism, replies, that the contrary is true; that all contained in the forms, to become something, requires to be thought:  and that logical forms are the foundations of all things.

It is not surprising that, starting from such premises, and reasoning after this fashion, Hegel finds his way to strange conclusions.  Out of space and time he proceeds to build up motion, matter, repulsion, attraction, weight, and inertia.  He then goes on to logically evolve the solar system.  In doing this he widely diverges from the Newtonian theory; reaches by syllogism the conviction that the planets are the most perfect celestial bodies; and, not being able to bring the stars within his theory, says that they are mere formal existences and not living matter, and that as compared with the solar system they are as little admirable as a cutaneous eruption or a swarm of flies.[2]

Results so outrageous might be left as self-disproved, were it not that speculators of this class are not alarmed by any amount of incongruity with established beliefs.  The only efficient mode of treating systems like this of Hegel, is to show that they are self-destructive—­that by their first steps they ignore that authority on which all their subsequent steps depend.  If Hegel professes, as he manifestly does, to develop his scheme by reasoning—­if he presents successive inferences as necessarily following from certain premises; he implies the postulate that a belief which necessarily follows after certain antecedents is a true belief:  and, did an opponent reply to one of his inferences, that, though it was impossible to think the opposite, yet the opposite was true, he would consider the reply irrational.  The procedure, however, which he would thus condemn as destructive of all thinking whatever, is just the procedure exhibited in the enunciation of his own first principles.