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HEGEL'S TREATMENT OF THE CATEGORIES OF THE IDEA. 181 next month. It is certain we cannot do this, and it is evident that Hegel never thought that we could. Whatever faults we may find in the applications of the dialectic, there is no trace of any attempt to deduce the facts of experience from the Absolute Idea. There are thus, when the dialectic has reached its furthest point, two elements left in experience which are independent of one another in the sense that neither can he reduced to the other. There is, on the one hand, the element of pure thought, which tells us, within certain limits, what our experience must and must not be, and there is the other element, known to us hy sensation or introspection, which informs us of what experience in fact is. All human language has an unfortunate tendency to sug- gest the categories of Essence, even when those categories are entirely inappropriate. And therefore such a statement as was made in the last paragraph looks as if Hegel's philo- sophy ended, after all, in a dualism, and he had failed in his object of demonstrating the complete rationality of the universe. But this is a mistake. The two elements of our experience are not two separate spheres of reality, and they are not even two separate realities which act and react on one another. As separate, they are not real at all, as may easily be seen by any one who tries to think of a category without thinking at the same time of matter of sensation, or vice versa. The only reality is the concrete whole of experience, from which they are both abstractions. There is no dualism in saying that two moments may be detected in a reality, and that, while both of them are dependent on the whole, neither is dependent on the other. Nor does the co-existence of these two moments in any way interfere with the complete rationality of the universe. There is no part of reality which is not completely penetrated with the Absolute Idea. So far as anything had any part of itself not penetrated with the Absolute Idea it would have no reality at all. Thus nothing can exist except in so far as it embodies reason, and is in harmony with reason. And this is all that is required. The real is more than abstract rationality, but the real is completely and utterly rational. This is surely all that any philosophy wants, however high its ambitions may be. At any rate it would be difficult to prove that Hegel ever wanted anything more. A word of caution is necessary here. We have seen that we cannot from the fact of the unity infer the particular nature of the plurality in other words that, for our present knowledge, the Absolute Idea and the matter of sensation