street—though Hegel says that ideas have legs. A concept must be derived, by thought, from a particular object, or particular objects; and it has often happened, as the whole history of science and philosophy bears witness, that a single object has given rise to very different concepts. Furthermore, the concepts of philosophy do not even enable us to foresee. If I should be converted tomorrow to Hegelianism, none of my anticipations would be changed; I should merely experience certain intellectual emotions somewhat different in character from those I now experience. It has been said many a time that the rabid Berkeleyite, even though he believes that the world is composed exclusively of spiritual phenomena, is just as careful as any materialist to avoid running into a wall.
This first analysis, then, has served to show that the "philosophic concept" is either unthinkable or is a general concept like the rest; that it is complete only by virtue of giving no information; and that it is in no sense adequate to reality.
There remains the famous dialectic of Hegel—but to this I shall return later on, attempting to give it a sense which is certainly not that desired by Hegel nor that intended by Croce. For the moment I wish to turn to the problem which I suggested at the start. We have seen that Hegelianism has no comprehensible intellectual
