The rationally active is everything; and activity and reality are synonyms,
and all reality is active, and what is not active is not real, and what is
not active has no existence.

Let not this activity be regarded as always advancing forward; the becoming
is not a river which flows; activity is activity and retro-activity. The
cause is cause of the effect, but also the effect is cause of its cause.
In fact the cause would not be cause if it had no effect; it is therefore,
thanks to its effect, because of its effect, that the cause is cause; and
therefore the effect is the cause of the cause as much as the cause is
cause of the effect.

A government is the effect of the character of a people, and the character
of a people is the effect also of its government; my son proceeds from me,
but he reacts on me, and because I am his father I have the character which
I gave him, more pronounced than before, etc.

Hence, all effect is cause as all cause is effect, which everybody has
recognized, but in addition all effect is cause of its cause and in
consequence, to speak in common language, all effect is cause forward and
backward, and the line of causes and effects is not a straight line but a
circle.

THE DEISM OF HEGEL.--God disappears from all that. No, Hegel is very
formally a deist, but he sees God in the total of things and not outside
things, yet distinct. In what way distinct? In this, that God is the
totality of things considered not in themselves but in the spirit that
animates them and the force that urges them, and because the soul is of
necessity in the body, united to the body, that is no reason why it should
not be distinct from it. And having taken up this position, Hegel is a