"contradictoriness," contradiction has logically this positive meaning.
Since it is an essential element of every partial, isolated, and
independent view of experience and thought, one is necessarily led to
transcend it and to see the universe in organic wholeness.

Thus, as Hegel puts his fundamental idea, "the truth is the whole."
Neither things nor categories, neither histories nor religions, neither
sciences nor arts, express or exhaust by themselves the whole essence of
the universe. The essence of the universe is the _life_ of the totality
of all things, not their _sum_. As the life of man is not the sum of his
bodily and mental functions, the whole man being present in each and all
of these, so must the universe be conceived as omnipresent in each of
its parts and expressions. This is the significance of Hegel's
conception of the universe as an organism. The World-Spirit--Hegel's
God--constitutes, thinks, lives, wills, and is _all_ in unity. The
evolution of the universe is thus the evolution of God himself.

The task of philosophy, then, as Hegel conceives it, is to portray in
systematic form the evolution of the World-Spirit in all its necessary
ramifications. These ramifications themselves are conceived as
constituting complete wholes, such as logic, nature, mind, society,
history, art, religion, philosophy, so that the universe in its onward
march through these is represented as a Whole of Wholes--_ein Kreis von
Kreisen_. In Hegel's complete philosophy each of these special spheres
finds its proper place and elaborate treatment.

Whether Hegel has well or ill succeeded in the task of exhibiting in
each and all of these spheres the one universal movement, whether or no
he was justified in reading into logic the same kind of development
manifested by life, or in making life conform to one logical