Hegel. Its greatest service was the restoration of the dialectic as the highest form of thought. The old Greek philosophers were all natural dialecticians, and the most universal intellect among them, Aristotle, was already the discoverer of the essential forms of dialectic thought. On the other hand, subsequent philosophy although in it there were brilliant exponents of the dialectic (e.g. Descartes and Spinoza), was more and more involved in the so-called metaphysical mode of thought, chiefly owing to English influence which completely mastered the French philosophers, at least of the eighteenth century. Outside of the strict frontiers of philosophy, masterpieces of the dialectic might be found occasionally of which I can only recall "Rameau's Nephew" by Diderot, and the treatise upon the origin of human inequality by Rousseau.
We now give briefly the essential features of the two modes of thought: we will return to them more fully later.
If we examine nature, the history of man or our own intellectual activities, we have presented to us an endless coil of interrelations and changes in which nothing is constant whatever be its nature, time or position, but every thing is in motion, suffers change, and passes away. This original, naïve and very nearly correct philosophy of the world is that of the old Greek philosophers and was first put in a very clear form by Heraclitus. Everything is and yet is not, since everything is in a state of flux, is comprehended as undergoing constant modification, as eternally existing and disappearing. But this philosophy, correct as it is as regards phenomena in general, viewed as a picture, is insufficient to explain the individual phenomena of which the picture of the universe is composed, and as long as we cannot do that we are not clear about the general picture. In order to study these individual phenomena we are obliged to take them out of their natural or social connection, and examine each of them by itself according to its own form and its particular origin and development. This is the task of natural science and historical investigation, branches of discovery to which the Greeks of classical times assigned a subordinate place for very good reasons, since they, first of all, had to collect the material. The beginning of an exact observation of nature was made first by the Greeks of the Alexandrine period, and was later developed further by the Arabs in the Middle Ages. True natural science hence dates from the second half of the fifteenth century, and from then on has advanced at a constantly growing rate. The dissection of nature into its separate parts, the separation of different natural events and natural conditions into certain classes, the examination of the interiors of organic bodies with respect to their manifold anatomical forms, furnished the fundamental reasons for the progress in a knowledge of nature which the last four hundred years have brought in their train. But it has caused us occasionally to drop into the habit of regarding natural phenomena and events as entities, apart from the great universal interrelations, and therefore not as moving but quiescent, not as changeable in their essence but fixed and constant, not in their life but in their death. And hence, just as happened with Bacon and Locke, this point of view has been carried over from science into philosophy, and has constituted the specially narrow view of the last century, the metaphysical mode of thought.
For the metaphysician, things and their pictures in the minds, concepts, are separate entities, one following the other without any regard to each other, stable, rigid, eternally fixed objects of investigation. The metaphysician thinks in antitheses. His conversation is "Yea, yea; Nay, nay" and whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil. For him a thing exists or it does not exist, a thing can never be itself and something else at the same time; positive and negative are mutually exclusive, cause and effect stand in stiff antagonism to each other. This method of thought seems at the first glance to be quite plausible because it is in accordance with sound common sense. But sound common sense, respectable fellow though he may be in his own home surrounded by his four walls, meets with strange adventures when he betakes himself into the wide world of investigation; and the metaphysical way of looking at things, sound and useful as it is, under given conditions, runs sooner or later into a stone wall, beyond which it is one-sided, stupid and abstract, and loses itself in insoluble contradictions. Because it omits to notice the interrelations of the individual phenomena, their existence, their coming and their going, their static and mobile conditions, and so to speak does not see the forest for trees. We know for example, with sufficient certainty for every day affairs, whether an animal is alive or dead, but, on closer examination, we find that this is sometimes no easy matter to decide, as jurists know very well and have gone indeed to great pains to discover a rational border line beyond which the killing of a child in the womb of its mother is murder. It is just as impossible too to fix the precise moment of death, for physiology shows that death is not a single and sudden event but a very slow process. Just so is every organic being at the same moment itself and not itself. Every moment it takes up matter coming to it from the outside and throws off other matter, every moment its body-cells die and are recreated. Indeed after a longer or shorter period the whole material of the body is renewed through the taking up of other particles of matter so that each organic being is at the same time itself and something else. We find also if we look at the matter more closely that the two poles of an antithesis, positive and negative, are just as inseparable as they are antagonistic, and that they, in spite of all their fixed antagonisms permeate each other, also that the cause and effect are concepts which can only realise themselves in relation to a particular case. However when we come to examine the separate case in its general relation to the world at large they come together and dissolve themselves in face of the working out of the universal problem, for, here, cause and effect exchange places, what was at one time and place effect becoming cause and vice versa.
All these phenomena and thought-concepts do not fit into the frame of metaphysical philosophy. According to the dialectic method of thinking which regards things and their concepts in relation to their connection with each other, their concatenation, their coming into being and passing away, phenomena, like the preceding, are so many confirmations of its own philosophy. Nature is the proof of the dialectic, and we must give to modern science the credit of having furnished an extraordinary wealth and daily increasing store of material towards this proof, and thereby showing in the last instance things proceed dialectically and not in accordance with metaphysical notions. But as the scientists who have learned to think dialectically may be still easily counted, the chaos arising from the confusion between actual results and an antiquated mode of thought is thus explained, and this confusion is to-day dominant in theoretical science, and drives teachers and pupils, writers and readers to despair.
A correct notion of the universe, of the human race, as well as of the reflection of this progress in the human mind can only be had by means of the dialectic method, together with a steady observation of the change and interchange which goes on in the universe, the coming into existence and passing away, progressive and retrogressive modification.
And the later German philosophy has proceeded from this standpoint. Kant began his career in this way by abolishing Newton's conception of a stable solar system which persisted after receiving its first impulse, in favor of a historical process, to wit, the origin of the sun and all the planets from a rotating mass of nebulæ. From this concept he drew the conclusion that, granted this origin, the future dissolution of the solar system is inevitable. His theory was mathematically proved by Laplace half a century later, and half a century later still the spectroscope discovered the existence of such glowing masses of gas in space in different stages of condensation.
This later German philosophy found its conclusion in the philosophy of Hegel where for the first time, and this is his greatest service, the entire natural, historical and spiritual universe was regarded as a process, that is, as in constant progress, change, transformation and development, and the attempt was made to show the more subtle relations of this process and development. From this historical point of view the history of mankind no longer appeared as a barren confusion of mindless forces, all alike subject to rejection before the judgment seat of the most recently ripened philosophy, and which, at the very best, man puts out of his mind as soon as possible, but as the development-process of humanity itself, to follow the process of which, little by little, through all its ramifications, and to establish the essential laws of which, in spite of all apparent accidents, is now the task of philosophic thought.
It is immaterial at this place that Hegel did not solve this problem. His epoch-making service was to have proposed it. It is a problem, moreover, which no individual can solve. Though Hegel, next to Saint Simon, was the most universal intellect of his time he was still limited,