SORROW AND ADVERSITY 197 



self upon the variety of ' Its Thought ' as an instance 

 of creative Power. Let us leave this God of Point- 

 land to the ignorant fruition of his omnipresence and 

 omniscience: nothing that you or I can do can rescue 

 him from his self-satisfaction." 



After this, as we floated gently back to Flatland, I 

 could hear the mild voice of my Companion pointing the 

 moral of my vision, and stimulating me to aspire, and to 

 teach others to aspire. 



ABBOTT: Flatland, pp. 141-4. 



" Our thought, ... in investigating reality, finds it- 

 self face to face, not only with distinct, but also with 

 opposed concepts. . . . Such are the antitheses of true 

 and false, of good and evil, beautiful and ugly, value 

 and lack of value, j oy and sorrow, activity and passivity, 

 positive and negative, life and death, being and not- 

 being, and so on. . . . Instead of finding the concrete 

 universal, the organic whole of reality which it seeks, 

 thought seems everywhere to run against two univer- 

 sals, opposing and menacing each other. . . . Why 

 should reality lose its true character when mind rises 

 from the contemplation of the particular to the con- 

 templation of the whole? Does not the whole live in 

 us as vividly as does the particular? 



"And here it is that Hegel gives his shout of jubila- 

 tion, the cry of the discoverer, the Eureka, his principle 

 of solution of the problem of opposites: a most simple 

 principle, and so obvious that it deserves to be placed 

 among those symbolised by the egg of Christopher Co- 

 lumbus. The opposites are not illusion, neither is unity 

 illusion. The opposites are opposed to one another, 

 but they are not opposed to unity. For true and con- 

 crete unity is nothing but the unity, or synthesis, of 



