differences in our ideas of opposition, or development, or cause and
effect, in the different sciences which make use of these terms. It rests
on a knowledge which is not the result of exact or serious enquiry, but is
floating in the air; the mind has been imperceptibly informed of some of
the methods required in the sciences. Hegel boasts that the movement of
dialectic is at once necessary and spontaneous: in reality it goes beyond
experience and is unverified by it. Further, the Hegelian philosophy,
while giving us the power of thinking a great deal more than we are able to
fill up, seems to be wanting in some determinations of thought which we
require. We cannot say that physical science, which at present occupies so
large a share of popular attention, has been made easier or more
intelligible by the distinctions of Hegel. Nor can we deny that he has
sometimes interpreted physics by metaphysics, and confused his own
philosophical fancies with the laws of nature. The very freedom of the
movement is not without suspicion, seeming to imply a state of the human
mind which has entirely lost sight of facts. Nor can the necessity which
is attributed to it be very stringent, seeing that the successive
categories or determinations of thought in different parts of his writings
are arranged by the philosopher in different ways. What is termed
necessary evolution seems to be only the order in which a succession of
ideas presented themselves to the mind of Hegel at a particular time.

The nomenclature of Hegel has been made by himself out of the language of
common life. He uses a few words only which are borrowed from his
predecessors, or from the Greek philosophy, and these generally in a sense
peculiar to himself. The first stage of his philosophy answers to the word
'is,' the second to the word 'has been,' the third to the words 'has been'
and 'is' combined. In other words, the first sphere is immediate, the
second mediated by reflection, the third or highest returns into the first,
and is both mediate and immediate. As Luther's Bible was written in the