longed to this period. But it was not Hegel's affair to revel in ecstasies over the ideals of the past. According to him ideal and reality, reason and actuality, are not real opposites.
He stood quite close to Schelling for a considerable period, during which time they published a paper in partnership. But important differences gradually arose and Hegel assails his former colleague openly in the preface to his first important treatise, Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807). He admits of course that Schelling understood that the problem consists in discovering the harmony between the antitheses. But he operates with a mere schema (subject-object), which he applies to everything mechanically, instead of showing how the one member of the antithesis effects the transition to the other by an inherent necessity, and how a higher unity of both is then formed. The absolute cannot be an immobile indifference; it is process, life, mind.—He showed, even in this book, how ordinary, practical consciousness rises to speculative consciousness through a series of steps, each of which leads to its successor by means of the contradictions discovered within itself. The reader is thus brought to the point from which he may grasp the pure system of ideas. This evolution takes place in the individual as well as in the human race as a whole; the Phenomenology is both a psychology and a history of civilization. The same law pertains to both realms, the same progressive dialectic.
b. According to Hegel dialectic is not only characteristic of thought, but it is likewise a fundamental law of being, because one form of existence always implies another and things are members of one grand totality.
No single idea is capable of expressing the totality of
