ABSOLUTE IDEALISM IOI 



elements of the higher; and here also the higher form is nothing 

 more than their reconciliation. Each of the two elements suffers 

 a certain modification; but that again means only that it has 

 lost its original deceptive appearance of isolated self-sufficiency. 

 The higher category shows better than the lower what the lower 

 really was. It is its 'truth,' that is to say, its logical outcome. 



Hegel repeatedly remarks upon the altered conception of 

 immediacy which this evolutionary doctrine brings to the fore. 

 The dialectic sets out from an immediate in the rationalistic 

 sense an absolutely simple and unrelated thought, which for that 

 very reason is empty of all content and cannot even be distin- 

 guished from its own negative. Hegel is insistent upon the point, 

 that no such thought can be more than this. But every new 

 synthesis is immediate in a different sense. It is self-mediated. 

 For though the preceding evolution is necessary in order to pro- 

 duce it, that evolution is itself. 



The same is true of the logical dialectic taken in its entirety. 

 Every category is the whole development up to itself. And the 

 supreme category is nothing more or less than the complete 

 dialectic. 



For this reason the mere temporal development of the cate- 

 gories, as the history of philosophy records it, is, after all, a 

 matter of secondary concern. The really significant thing is 

 the dialectic as it' exists in the higher category. For though the 

 historical process, in so far as it occurs at all, occurs in precisely 

 the one possible manner, nevertheless it is constantly obscured 

 and interrupted. Historical change is not always progress. 

 Moreover the very temporal sequence of the stages gives them 

 an appearance of mutual externality, which is the reverse of truth. 

 Not that the historical course of events is without its suggestive- 

 ness. But it is logical insight the perception of the eternal 

 synthesis of opposites that alone can be receptive to the sug- 

 gestions of history. Thus, in principle, logic, the science of the 

 eternal dialectic, is the presupposition of the intelligent study 

 of the historical dialectic. It belongs, indeed, to the historian of 



