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494 HEGEL. other no longer; the opposition or contradiction is over- come. But the synthesis is still not a final one ; the play begins anew ; again an opposition makes its appearance, which in turn seeks to be overcome, etc. Each separate concept is one-sided, defective, represents only a part of 'the truth, needs to be supplemented by its contrary, and, 'by its union with this, its complement, yields a higher con- cept, which comes nearer to the whole truth, but still does not quite reach it. Even the last and richest concept — th e absolute Ide a — is by itself alone not the full truth ; fhe result implies the whole development through which it has been attained. It is only at the end of such a dialec- tic of concepts that philosophy reaches complete cor- respondence with the living reality, which it has to comprehend ; and the speculative progress of thought is no capricious sporting with concepts on the part of the think- ing subject, but the adequate expression of the movement of the matter itself. Since the world and its ground is development, it can only be known through a develop- ment of concepts. The law which this follows, in little as in great, is the advance from position to opposition, and thence to combination. The most comprehensive example of this triad — Idea, Nature, Spirit — gives the division of the system ; the second — Subjective, Objective, Absolute Spirit — determines the articulation of the third part. 2. The System. Hegel began with a Phenomenology by way of intro- duction, in which (not to start, like the school of Schelling, with absolute knowledge " as though shot from a pistol ") he describes the genesis of philosophical cognition with an attractive mingling of psychological and philosophico-historical points of view. He makes spirit — the universal world-spirit as well as the individual conscious- ness, which repeats in brief the stages in the development of humanity — pass through six stadia, of which the first three (consciousness, self-consciousness, reason) correspond to the progress of the intermediate part of the Doctrine of Subjective Spirit, which is entitled Phdnomenologie, and the others (ethical spirit, religion, and absolute knowledge)