98 DOGMATISM AND EVOLUTION 



continues to exist, the renewed course of family life itself, with 

 the consequent numerical increase of the group, must bring about 

 in time the practical dissolution of that tie. Thus a competitive 

 system is originated, which is the complete antithesis of all that 

 the family is and represents. But unrestrained competition has 

 in it, in precisely similar fashion, the seeds of its own undoing. 

 That competition may be effectual, the possession of goods must 

 be assured; and such an assurance can only be given by a new 

 family unity not the primitive family based upon human in 

 stinct, to be sure, but the self-conscious family which we call 

 the state. The state, then, is the outcome of a two-fold process 

 of self-negation. The family has given rise to its opposite, and 

 this opposite has in turn given rise to its opposite; which, how 

 ever, is not now the primitive form from which the development 

 set out, but a higher unity in which both of the earlier stages are 

 contained as essential elements. To be sure, neither the family 

 nor the competitive order is quite what it was before the origin 

 of civil society. But that is simply to say that each has lost the 

 appearance of self-subsistent completeness which it formerly pos 

 sessed. It has become a civil institution, aufgehoben, incor 

 porated, in the larger life of the state. The complex process 

 thus exemplified is called dialectic. 



In the dialectical movement there is one feature to which 

 especial attention must be called. This is the fact, that it is 

 the very nature of the lower forms to develop in the manner 

 described. The development is not something which occurs to 

 them by reason of accidental surrounding conditions. It is im 

 plicitly contained in them; and as it proceeds it exhibits what 

 their real nature was better than they did themselves. It alone 

 reveals their truth, as distinguished from what they seemed to be. 

 In a different sense, the whole development is contained in the 

 higher form which is its outcome. Indeed, when it is reflected 

 that the development is not a mere temporal succession of events, 

 but a logical sequence of essentially interrelated factors, it may 

 be said that the higher form is the development; for in it the 

 same opposition and synthesis are evermore preserved. 



