existence is complete. It follows from this that all previous philosophies
which are worthy of the name are not mere opinions or speculations, but
stages or moments of thought which have a necessary place in the world of
mind. They are no longer the last word of philosophy, for another and
another has succeeded them, but they still live and are mighty; in the
language of the Greek poet, 'There is a great God in them, and he grows not
old.' (iv) This vast ideal system is supposed to be based upon experience.
At each step it professes to carry with it the 'witness of eyes and ears'
and of common sense, as well as the internal evidence of its own
consistency; it has a place for every science, and affirms that no
philosophy of a narrower type is capable of comprehending all true facts.

The Hegelian dialectic may be also described as a movement from the simple
to the complex. Beginning with the generalizations of sense, (1) passing
through ideas of quality, quantity, measure, number, and the like, (2)
ascending from presentations, that is pictorial forms of sense, to
representations in which the picture vanishes and the essence is detached
in thought from the outward form, (3) combining the I and the not-I, or the
subject and object, the natural order of thought is at last found to
include the leading ideas of the sciences and to arrange them in relation
to one another. Abstractions grow together and again become concrete in a
new and higher sense. They also admit of development from within their own
spheres. Everywhere there is a movement of attraction and repulsion going
on--an attraction or repulsion of ideas of which the physical phenomenon
described under a similar name is a figure. Freedom and necessity, mind
and matter, the continuous and the discrete, cause and effect, are
perpetually being severed from one another in thought, only to be
perpetually reunited. The finite and infinite, the absolute and relative
are not really opposed; the finite and the negation of the finite are alike
lost in a higher or positive infinity, and the absolute is the sum or