correlation of all relatives. When this reconciliation of opposites is
finally completed in all its stages, the mind may come back again and
review the things of sense, the opinions of philosophers, the strife of
theology and politics, without being disturbed by them. Whatever is, if
not the very best--and what is the best, who can tell?--is, at any rate,
historical and rational, suitable to its own age, unsuitable to any other.
Nor can any efforts of speculative thinkers or of soldiers and statesmen
materially quicken the 'process of the suns.'

Hegel was quite sensible how great would be the difficulty of presenting
philosophy to mankind under the form of opposites. Most of us live in the
one-sided truth which the understanding offers to us, and if occasionally
we come across difficulties like the time-honoured controversy of necessity
and free-will, or the Eleatic puzzle of Achilles and the tortoise, we
relegate some of them to the sphere of mystery, others to the book of
riddles, and go on our way rejoicing. Most men (like Aristotle) have been
accustomed to regard a contradiction in terms as the end of strife; to be
told that contradiction is the life and mainspring of the intellectual
world is indeed a paradox to them. Every abstraction is at first the enemy
of every other, yet they are linked together, each with all, in the chain
of Being. The struggle for existence is not confined to the animals, but
appears in the kingdom of thought. The divisions which arise in thought
between the physical and moral and between the moral and intellectual, and
the like, are deepened and widened by the formal logic which elevates the
defects of the human faculties into Laws of Thought; they become a part of
the mind which makes them and is also made up of them. Such distinctions
become so familiar to us that we regard the thing signified by them as
absolutely fixed and defined. These are some of the illusions from which
Hegel delivers us by placing us above ourselves, by teaching us to analyze
the growth of 'what we are pleased to call our minds,' by reverting to a