true reality felt within the mind, is the moving cause of that unrest which sets up the dialectical process.” And again: “The whole, which is both sides of this process, rejects the claim of a one-sided datum, and supplements it by that other and opposite side which really is implied — so begetting by negation a balanced unity. This path once entered on, the process starts afresh with the whole just reached. But this also is seen to be the one-sided expression of a higher synthesis; and it gives birth to an opposite which co-unites with it into a second whole, a whole which in its turn is degraded into a fragment of truth. So the process goes on till the mind therein implicit finds a product which answers its unconscious idea; and here, having become in its own entirety a datum to itself, it rests in the activity which is self-conscious in its object.”
If we hold, according to this view, that the dialectic process depends on the relation between the concrete whole and the part of it which has as yet become explicit, it is clear that we cannot regard the concrete whole as produced out of the incomplete and lower category by means of the dialectic process, since the process cannot exist without the whole which is its presupposition.
Hegel’s own language appears to me to confirm this theory. There is nothing contrary to it in his attempt in the Philosophy of Religion, the Philosophy of History, and the History of Philosophy to explain various successions of events in time as manifestations of the dialectic. If the dialectic is the key to the universe, then, whenever we do view the universe under the aspect of time, the different categories will appear as manifesting themselves as a process in time. But the fact that they can appear successively, and in time, does not necessarily imply that they came into existence successively, and are fundamentally a time series.
Even in this part of his work, too. Hegel’s adherence to the eternal nature of the dialectic becomes evident in a manner all the more significant because it is logically unjustifiable. In several places he seems on the point of saying that all dissatisfaction with the existing state of the universe, and all efforts to reform it, are futile and vain, since reason is already and always the sole reality. The conclusion cannot be fairly drawn from the eternity of the dialectic process. For if we are entitled to hold the universe perfect, the same arguments lead us to consider it also timeless and changeless. Imperfection and progress then may claim to share whatever reality is to be allowed to time and change, and no conclusion can be drawn, such as Hegel
