THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
a continuous development of oppositions, and their merging and recon-
ciliation. Schelling was right there is an underlying ''identity of opposites":
and Fichte was rieht thesis, antithesis and syrithesis constitute
the formula and secret of all development and all reality.
For not only do thoughts develop and evolve according to this "dialectical
movement," but things do equally; every condition of aflairs contains
a contradiction which evolution must resolve by a reconciling units-. So>
no doubt, our present social system secretes a self-corroding contradiction:
the stimulating individualism required in a period of economic adoles-
cence and unexploited resources, arouses, in a later age, the aspiration
for a cooperative commonwealth; and the future will see neither the
present reality nor the visioncd ideal, but a synthesis in which something
of both will come together to beget a higher life. And that higher stage too
will divide into a productive contradiction, and rise to still loftier levels
of organization, complexity, and unity. The movement of thought, then>
is the same as the movement of things: in each there is a dialectical progression
from unity through diversity to diversiiy-in-unity. Thought and
being follow the same law: and logic and metaphysics are one.
Mind is the indispensable organ for the perception of this dialectical
process, and this unity in difference. The function of the rnind, and the
task of philosophy, is to discover the unity that lies potential in diversity;
the task of ethics is to unify character and conduct; and the task of politics
is to unify individuals into a state. The task of religion is to reach and feel
that Absolute in which all opposites are resolved into unity, that great
sum of being in which matter and mind, subject and object, good and
evil, are one. God is the system of relationships in which all things move
and have their being and their significance. In man the Absolute rises to
self-consciousness, and becomes the Absolute Idea that is, thought
realizing itself as part of the Absolute, transcending individual limitations
and purposes s and catching, underneath the universal strife, the hidden
harmony of all things* "Reason is the substance of the universe;
. . . the
design of the world is absolutely rational."64
Not that strife and evil are mere negative imaginings; they are real
enough; but they are, in wisdom's perspective, stages to fulfilment and
the good. Struggle is the law of growth; character is built in the storm
and stress of the world; and a man reaches his full height only through
compulsions, responsibilities, and suffering. Even pain has its rationale;
it is a sign of life and a stimulus to reconstruction. Passion also has a place
in the reason of things: "nothing great in the world has been accom-
plished without passion**; 65 and even the egoistic ambitions of a Napoleon
contribute unwittingly to the development of nations. Life is not made
for happiness, but for achievement. "The history of the world is not the
theatre of happiness; periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they
"'Hegel: Philosophy of History, Bofan ed., pp. 9, 13.
*IH