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This is the maxim of the Hegelian logic, which starts from the synthesis of Being and Not-being into the Becoming, a very ancient doctrine, long since offered as an explanation of certain phenomena, which I shall now touch upon. A thought and its privative alone that is, a quality and its negative cannot lead to a more comprehensive thought. It is devoid of relation and barren.

That something greater than ourselves, which does not so much exist as seek existence, palpitating between being and not-being, how marvellous it is!

He who has an opinion has an opinion about some one thing? Yes. And not-being is not one thing but, properly speaking, nothing? True. Of not-being, ignorance was assumed to be the necessary correlative; of being, knowledge? True, he said. Then opinion is not concerned either with being or with not-being? Not with either. And can therefore neither be ignorance nor knowledge? That seems to be true.

Evil is not an intruder in an otherwise perfect universe; finiteness presumes it. A thing is only seen to be evil when the capacity for good is present and unsatisfied. Evil is not a principle at war with good. Good is being and evil is not-being. When consciousness of being seeks further expression and finds itself hindered by its limitations, it becomes aware of evil.

He replied: They are like the punning riddles which are asked at feasts or the children's puzzle about the eunuch aiming at the bat, with what he hit him, as they say in the puzzle, and upon what the bat was sitting. The individual objects of which I am speaking are also a riddle, and have a double sense: nor can you fix them in your mind, either as being or not-being, or both, or neither.

We find that Hegel's "Logic" begins with existence as does that of Herr Duehring; that existence displays itself as nothing, as with Herr Duehring; that out of this not-being, a leap is made into being, and that existence is the result of this, that is a more complete and higher form of being, as with Herr Duehring. Being leads to quality, quality to quantity, just as with Herr Duehring.

And therefore the one which is not has being and also not-being. And the union of being and not-being involves change or motion. But how can not-being, which is nowhere, move or change, either from one place to another or in the same place? And whether it is or is not, it would cease to be one if experiencing a change of substance.

He does not imagine the world of sense to be made up of opposites or to be in a perpetual flux, but to vary within certain limits which are controlled by what he calls the principle of the same. Unlike the Eleatics, who relegated the world to the sphere of not-being, he admits creation to have an existence which is real and even eternal, although dependent on the will of the creator.

His chief argument to prove the first position laid down by him depended on a double and ambiguous use of the word is; "That which is not, is the non-existent: the word is must, therefore, be applicable to it as truly as when we say That which is, is; therefore, being is predicable of that which is not." So conversely he proved not-being to be predicable of that which is.

If they say that matter <will become> formless: in the first place, why does this happen to the world as a whole when it does not happen to any part? Secondly, by this hypothesis they do not destroy the being of bodies, but only their beauty. Further, everything destroyed is either resolved into the elements from which it came, or else vanishes into not-being.