Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/346

IV. THE ABSOLUTE OF HEGELIANISM. BY A. K. EOGRES. AMONG the adherents of that school which in a rough way may be termed the Hegelian school there are, as is well known, two pretty distinct tendencies represented. I suppose that these tendencies may be traced respectively to the Kantian and to the Hegelian strain in the general method of thought which the school stands for. On the one hand, the emphasis is placed upon the comprehensive unity of knowledge with which reality is identified. The individual, and, indeed, the race, fall into the background as compared with this complete and eternal fact of existence, which human knowledge only reproduces very imperfectly. As opposed to this static conception, which of course is represented in its more orthodox form by Green and his immediate followers, and, more independently, by such writers as Bradley, Eoyce and McTaggart, the other, or Hegelian strain, lays emphasis on the nature of thought or experience as a living and developing organism. Here the actual facts of growth in human experience as such are very much in evidence, and far from being a comparatively meaningless set of approxi- mations to a reality which already exists complete in itself, are the very stuff from which reality is made ; indeed, no definition can be given of a reality except as it is placed in this ever- widening process of growth. 1 I shall, for my present purpose, be content with assuming that the more recent Hegelians are right in defining reality as a process, rather than a timeless content of knowledge ; what I wish to consider is the relation of the concept of God to this process of reality, and the grounds on which the Hegelian considers himself justified in discarding an ultimate self distinct from human selves, and in defining God as merely the process of reality itself which finds its whole expression 1 See McTaggart, Hegelian Dialectic, p. 7 : " Eeality itself is not a process, but a stable and timeless state " ; and cf. with this Wallace, MIXD, vol. v., p. 551 : "The Absolute is atjeast life, at least Ego, and it' these are not process ... it is difficult to see where we are to look for examples of process ".