168 THE UNIVERSE 



universal to all particulars, is necessary to the true 

 conception of the organic unity of the world. All 

 opposition of thought and things are relative opposi- 

 tions which find a solution in the life and movement 

 of the whole. In all the great controversies that 

 have divided the world the combatants have really 

 been co-operators. They developed truth and un^. 



We do not see anything truly until we comprehend 

 it as a whole, and see it in all its relations to the 

 universe. Everything so far as it has an independ- 

 ent, individual existence at all is an organism. 

 While conceiving the universe as organic, Hegel 

 maintained that it "is not a natural but a spiritual 

 organism." For the limited scope of a natural or- 

 ganism and its process cannot be regarded as com- 

 mensurate with a universe which comprehends all 

 existence, whether classed as organic or inorganic. 

 Only the conscious and self-conscious unity of mind 

 can overreach and overcome such extreme antag- 

 onisms and reduce them all to elements in the reali- 

 zation of its own life. 



The natural universe, I contend, is an organism 

 which includes nature, but manifests its ultimate or 

 highest spiritual force only in the life of man. The 

 universe as an electric organism obeys the higher 

 supreme spiritual forces. It is said that " Hegel was 

 only working out in the sphere of speculative 

 thought what Christianity had already expressed for 

 the ordinary consciousness." Nearly all great think- 

 ers, I contend, reason forward or backward to the 

 fundamental truths of the Bible, only expressed in a 

 little different way, and which is the old familiar 

 process in human history of " pouring old wine into 

 new bottles." Hegel sought to show how an ideal- 



