88 DOGMATISM AND EVOLUTION 



by the fatal narrowness and abstractness of rationalism, but a 

 divergence none the less. It is philosophy passed out of itself 

 into its other; or, as it is somewhere expressed, it is a kind of 

 philosophy in the same sense in which darkness is a kind of light. 

 In a w r ord, Hegel s opposition to empiricism is as strong as his 

 own principles permitted him to assume toward any philosophy 

 whatsoever. This, we repeat, appears to us to be his most serious 

 limitation; and it may be added, that in Great Britain, where the 

 Hegelian philosophy is now most strongly established, this origi 

 nal limitation has only become more prominent by reason of the 

 long and bitter warfare with the empirical philosophy, whose 

 reign its invasion disturbed. 



The cleft between absolute idealism and the old logic is most 

 strikingly displayed in the theory of relations. While for the 

 dogmatists these had been invariably external to the essence of 

 the terms related, for absolute idealism the essences of things 

 are wholly constituted by their relations. It may be of assistance 

 to us in our endeavor to appreciate the absolutist position, if we 

 retrace, in a general and schematic way, the thought-transition 

 by which this revolutionary change was effected. 



The long continued controversy over the heliocentric hypothe 

 sis was sufficient to familiarize even the popular mind with the 

 idea, that rest and motion at least in the ordinary application 

 of the terms do not appertain to things as they are in them 

 selves, but only to things in definite relation to other things. 

 Whether there must be assumed an absolute standard underlying 

 these relativities, remained a question for the learned; and both 

 sides were taken by eminent authorities. From the end of the 

 seventeenth century, however, the relativistic position was, 

 though widely questioned, a commonplace of scientific theory. 



Intimately associated with the foregoing and, no less attractive 

 to the speculative mind, was the theory of the relativity of spatial 

 magnitude. This, too, met with scepticism, but the common 

 intelligence had long embraced it as self-evident. The celebrated 



