100 DOGMATISM AND EVOLUTION 



be vain enough to hope that by bringing together the results of 

 their labors he may produce a system that shall surpass them 

 all, he ought not to be unwilling to reflect that his own best 

 thoughts will be reduced to a place of subordination in the grander 

 system of the future. 



Needless to say, the process is here, as elsewhere, dialectical. 

 Indeed, it is from this field that the concept of dialectic is ob- 

 viously derived. No philosophy is refuted until it refutes itself; 

 and its self-refutation means that it passes over into its negative. 

 Thus it is the palpable failure of rationalism to explain the indi- 

 viduality of things upon universal grounds, that makes empiri- 

 cism inevitable. But the negative is equally insecure ; as the fail- 

 ure of empiricism to frame an adequate account of the universal 

 aspects of things illustrates. Hence the second negative arises, 

 which is the synthesis of the two opposites. Philosophy returns 

 to the universal as its principle; but this is not now the empty 

 universal of rationalism, but the generic type which contains 

 the grounds of its own differentiation. Absolute idealism is thus 

 the truth of both rationalism and empiricism, their logical out- 

 come which first makes clear what each really contained. And 

 as it maintains both within itself as essential factors of its own 

 higher complexity, the dialectic by which it has arisen still con- 

 tinues evermore within it it is that dialectic. 



What is thus true of philosophical systems is equally true of 

 those fundamental concepts in terms of which the interpretation 

 of the universe is carried on; for the history of philosophy is 

 essentially conditioned by the development of these concepts. 

 Philosophy comes into existence with the explicit emergence of 

 pure thought, in the Eleatic school; and it is naturally then in 

 the poorest of its categories, that is to say, at the lowest of its 

 possible stages: mere being. The great advance made by Hera- 

 clitus (whom Hegel apparently supposes to be later than Par- 

 menides) is due to the fact, that he has made out the dialectical 

 unity of being and its negation, in the relatively complex category 

 of becoming. Here also the lower forms continue as permanent 



