104 DOGMATISM AND EVOLUTION 



without citizens. So, too, God himself exists only as he is self- 

 conscious in man.) When you think measure, or cause, or end, 

 it is not you, as you, that think it. The logic is not a develop- 

 ment within your particular self, or even an inheritance passed 

 on from man to man and increased by successive exertions. "For 

 these thousands of years the same Architect has directed the 

 work; and that Architect is the one living Mind, whose thinking 

 nature it is to bring to self-consciousness what it is, and, with its 

 being [i. e., its present stage of development] set as an object 

 before it, to be at the same time raised above it, and so to reach 

 a higher state of its own being." 1 



Now in relation to experience pure thought is altogether a priori 

 as its character of universality and necessity sufficiently indi- 

 cates. It needs no experiential evidence to support it; and all 

 experience must conform to it. But the relation of pure thought 

 to concrete thought which is very different from mere experience 

 is not thereby stated. For concrete thought is the result of a 

 further development. As a matter of human history this devel- 

 opment consists in an appropriation of the most general results 

 of the empirical sciences, and the casting of them into a form in 

 which they possess the self-sufficient necessity of pure thought 

 itself that is to say, we repeat, an absolute independence of 

 mere fact or of any inductive evidence. For this achievement 

 the inductive sciences themselves were, to be sure, a necessary 

 precondition; but that does not compromise the certainty of the 

 result. 2 The logic, too, is a precondition but only as a lower 

 stage of a development comes before a higher; which, let it be 

 remembered, means that the logic first shows what it truly is, 

 when it is viewed as an element in concrete thought. Seen, then, 

 in its truth, the advance is a typical dialectic, due, as always, to 

 the fact that the given stage contains more implicitly than it 



l., 13, Wallace's translation, slightly altered. 

 2 The relation here is like that of the experiment to the rationalistic deduction. 

 By reason of the finitude of human powers the experiment is necessary in order to 

 point the way. But experimental evidence forms no part of the structure of the 

 science. 



