are all one--latent in one another--developed out of one another.

This method of opposites has supplied new instruments of thought for the
solution of metaphysical problems, and has thrown down many of the walls
within which the human mind was confined. Formerly when philosophers
arrived at the infinite and absolute, they seemed to be lost in a region
beyond human comprehension. But Hegel has shown that the absolute and
infinite are no more true than the relative and finite, and that they must
alike be negatived before we arrive at a true absolute or a true infinite.
The conceptions of the infinite and absolute as ordinarily understood are
tiresome because they are unmeaning, but there is no peculiar sanctity or
mystery in them. We might as well make an infinitesimal series of
fractions or a perpetually recurring decimal the object of our worship.
They are the widest and also the thinnest of human ideas, or, in the
language of logicians, they have the greatest extension and the least
comprehension. Of all words they may be truly said to be the most inflated
with a false meaning. They have been handed down from one philosopher to
another until they have acquired a religious character. They seem also to
derive a sacredness from their association with the Divine Being. Yet they
are the poorest of the predicates under which we describe him--signifying
no more than this, that he is not finite, that he is not relative, and
tending to obscure his higher attributes of wisdom, goodness, truth.

The system of Hegel frees the mind from the dominion of abstract ideas. We
acknowledge his originality, and some of us delight to wander in the mazes
of thought which he has opened to us. For Hegel has found admirers in
England and Scotland when his popularity in Germany has departed, and he,
like the philosophers whom he criticizes, is of the past. No other thinker
has ever dissected the human mind with equal patience and minuteness. He
has lightened the burden of thought because he has shown us that the chains