SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION 



things outside of us, and we ourselves, are buf. 

 different expressions of the absolute idea, there 

 can be nothing in the world that will remain un- 

 knowable to us. 



Thinking and being were thus monistically 

 united. But thinking was the only reality in 

 Hegel's philosophy, and being merely an attribute 

 of thought. So the idealist monism of this 

 thinker came to this insoluble contradiction : It 

 tried to prove the reality of the absolute idea by 

 the identity of thinking and being, but the only 

 reliable means by which it could accomplish this 

 was the use of " pure " thought. It had to reject 

 all empirical methods, and rely solely on the power 

 of so-called innate (a priori) ideas for the solution 

 of the world's riddles. But innate ideas can 

 operate only with purely introspective philosophy 

 for the solution of all scientific problems. This, 

 however, was contrary to the dialectic (evolution- 

 ary) method of research, which compelled Hegel 

 to collect the experienced facts of history. Ac- 

 cording to this dialectic, the absolute idea de- 

 veloped by a process of evolution in such a way, 

 that every phenomenon begot its own negation, 

 which in turn was followed by a negation of the 

 negation, leading to the reproduction of the orig- 

 inal phenomenon on a higher scale. In fact, he 



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