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I have heard it maintained that the man has yet to be born, who, in his heart of hearts, if he comes to think the matter over, won't find himself at something of a loss to conceive why any given woman should experience the passion of love for any other man; that a woman's choice, to all men save the chosen, is, by its very nature, as incomprehensible as the postulates of Hegel.

Toward the latter part of our conversation, referring to one idea expressed, he said, "That is about what Hegel held, is it not?" As he spoke he opened his knapsack, which I then saw to be full of books, and drew out an English translation of Hegel's "Philosophy of History"; he had evidently read it carefully, making his notes in Japanese on the margin. I asked him if he had read it through.

"There'll be generations o' lads an' lasses, ma'am, that will rise up in auld Scotland an' go up an' down through a' the warld a' ca' David Lockerby 'blessed." "Franz, good morning. Whose philosophy is it now? Hegel, Spinosa, Kant or Dugald Stewart?" "None of them. I am reading Faust." "Worse and worse. Better wrestle with philosophies than lose yourself in the clouds.

He starts from the fact that philosophers use the word development to designate a definite sequence of ideas, i.e., in a logical order. "Metamorphosis, says Hegel, belongs to the Idea as such since its variation alone is development. Rational speculation must get rid of such nebulous concepts as the evolution of the more highly developed animal organisms from the less developed, etc."

Whatever you posit appears thus as one-sided, and negates its other, which, being equally one-sided, negates it; and, since this situation remains unstable, the two contradictory terms have together, according to Hegel, to engender a higher truth of which they both appear as indispensable members, mutually mediating aspects of that higher concept of situation in thought.

This whole manner of investigation and proof is one of those numerous unconscious logical fallacies which, introduced by Hegel, have gradually attained a certain title by possession.

"Oh, thank you; I see," said Margaret, with the kind readiness of woman, who would profess to "see" the Secret of Hegel, or the inmost heart of the Binomial Theorem, or the nature of the duties of cover-point, or the latest hypothesis about the frieze of the Parthenon, rather than be troubled with prolonged explanations, which the expositor, after all, might find it inconvenient to give.

The mask of unintelligibility holds out the longest; this is only in Germany, however, where it was introduced by Fichte, perfected by Schelling, and attained its highest climax finally in Hegel, always with the happiest results.

It certainly did to the whole idealist school of Germany, to such thinkers as Hegel, Schelling and Fichte, to deeply religious spirits like Coleridge and Wordsworth, to Emerson in America, and Carlyle in England.

The evolution of the universe is thus the evolution of God himself. The task of philosophy, then, as Hegel conceives it, is to portray in systematic form the evolution of the World-Spirit in all its necessary ramifications.