Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/515

/ DIALECTIC METHOD. 493 •'^Thc conflict between the philosophy of reflection and the philosophy of intuition, which Hegel endeavors to terminate by a speculation at once conceptual and concrete, concerns '(i) the organ of thought, (2) the object of thought, (3) the nature and logical dignity of the contradiction^' The organ of the true philosophy is neither the abstract reflective understanding, which finds itself shut up within the limits of the phenomenal, nor mystical intuition, which expects by a quick leap to gain the summit of knowledge concerning the absolute, but reason as the faculty of concrete concepts. That concept is concrete which does V liot assume an attitude of cold repulsion toward its con- / trary, but seeks self-mediation with the latter, and moves from thesis through antithesis, and with it, to synthesis. Reason neither fixes the opposites nor denies them, but has them become identical. The unity of opposites is neither impossible nor present from the first, but the result of a development. The object of philosophy is not the phenomenal world or the relative, but the absolute, and this not as pas- sive substance, but as living subject, which divides into distinctions,_and returns from them to identity, which develops thr«3ugh .tJie..o.ppAsiie5. The absolute is a process, and all that is real the manifestation of this process. If science is to correspond to reality, it also must be a pro- cess. Philosophy is thought- movement (di alectic); it is a system oT^oncepts, each of which passes over into its s'uccessor^'puts itsTsuccessor (pjrth Jrom itself, just as it has been gen e rated. .by-it&4)xedecessor. All reality is_jdevelopment, and the motive force in this de'veTopment (of the vvorld as well as of science) is opposi- tion, conLrjzdiciinn' Without this there would be no move- ment and no life. Thus all reality is full of contradiction, and yet rational. The contradiction is not that which is en-! tirely alogical, but it is a spur to further thinking. It must not be annulled, but " sublated " {aufgehoben), i. e., at once ^negated and conserved. This is effected by thinking the contradictory concepts together in a third higher, more comprehensive, and richer concept, whose moments they then form. As sublated moments they contradict each