scarcely understand how a deep thinker like Hegel could have hoped to
revive or supplant the old traditional faith by an unintelligible
abstraction: or how he could have imagined that philosophy consisted only
or chiefly in the categories of logic. For abstractions, though combined
by him in the notion, seem to be never really concrete; they are a
metaphysical anatomy, not a living and thinking substance. Though we are
reminded by him again and again that we are gathering up the world in
ideas, we feel after all that we have not really spanned the gulf which
separates phainomena from onta.

Having in view some of these difficulties, he seeks--and we may follow his
example--to make the understanding of his system easier (a) by
illustrations, and (b) by pointing out the coincidence of the speculative
idea and the historical order of thought.

(a) If we ask how opposites can coexist, we are told that many different
qualities inhere in a flower or a tree or in any other concrete object, and
that any conception of space or matter or time involves the two
contradictory attributes of divisibility and continuousness. We may ponder
over the thought of number, reminding ourselves that every unit both
implies and denies the existence of every other, and that the one is many--
a sum of fractions, and the many one--a sum of units. We may be reminded
that in nature there is a centripetal as well as a centrifugal force, a
regulator as well as a spring, a law of attraction as well as of repulsion.
The way to the West is the way also to the East; the north pole of the
magnet cannot be divided from the south pole; two minus signs make a plus
in Arithmetic and Algebra. Again, we may liken the successive layers of
thought to the deposits of geological strata which were once fluid and are
now solid, which were at one time uppermost in the series and are now
hidden in the earth; or to the successive rinds or barks of trees which