a kindred spirit and of the same intellectual family. For example, in the
Sophist Plato begins with the abstract and goes on to the concrete, not in
the lower sense of returning to outward objects, but to the Hegelian
concrete or unity of abstractions. In the intervening period hardly any
importance would have been attached to the question which is so full of
meaning to Plato and Hegel.

They differ however in their manner of regarding the question. For Plato
is answering a difficulty; he is seeking to justify the use of common
language and of ordinary thought into which philosophy had introduced a
principle of doubt and dissolution. Whereas Hegel tries to go beyond
common thought, and to combine abstractions in a higher unity: the
ordinary mechanism of language and logic is carried by him into another
region in which all oppositions are absorbed and all contradictions
affirmed, only that they may be done away with. But Plato, unlike Hegel,
nowhere bases his system on the unity of opposites, although in the
Parmenides he shows an Hegelian subtlety in the analysis of one and Being.

It is difficult within the compass of a few pages to give even a faint
outline of the Hegelian dialectic. No philosophy which is worth
understanding can be understood in a moment; common sense will not teach us
metaphysics any more than mathematics. If all sciences demand of us
protracted study and attention, the highest of all can hardly be matter of
immediate intuition. Neither can we appreciate a great system without
yielding a half assent to it--like flies we are caught in the spider's web;
and we can only judge of it truly when we place ourselves at a distance
from it. Of all philosophies Hegelianism is the most obscure: and the
difficulty inherent in the subject is increased by the use of a technical
language. The saying of Socrates respecting the writings of Heracleitus--
'Noble is that which I understand, and that which I do not understand may