two different things, we should have had no grounds to believe either. Any real opposition may conceivably be synthesised. But it is as impossible to get a harmony out of an absolute blank, as it is to get anything else.
Here, however, when we have two positive conclusions, which appear indeed to be incompatible, but have more in them than simple incompatibility, it is not impossible that a higher notion could be found, by which each should be recognised as true, and by which it should be seen that they were really not mutually exclusive.
The thesis and antithesis in Hegel’s logic always stand to one another in a relation of contrary opposition. In the higher stages, no doubt, the antithesis is more than a mere opposite of the thesis, and already contains an element of synthesis. But the element of opposition, which is always there, is always an opposition of contraries. Hence it does not seem impossible that this further case of contrary opposition should be dealt with in the same way as that which Hegel uses. Incompatible as the two terms seem at present, they can hardly seem more hopelessly opposed than any pair of contraries in the dialectic would seem, before their synthesis had been found.
It is possible, also, to see some reasons why such a solution, if possible at all, should not be possible yet, and why it would be the last abstraction to be removed as the dialectic process rebuilds concrete realities. Our aim is to reconcile the fact that the Absolute Idea exists eternally in its full perfection, with the fact that it manifests itself as something incomplete and imperfect. Now it is only as a process, and consequently as something incomplete and imperfect, that the Absolute Idea becomes known to us. We have to grasp its moments successively, and to be led on from the lower to the higher. We cannot therefore become aware of any inadequacy which there may be in the idea of process, or of any synthesis which would reconcile that idea with the idea of eternal existence, except as the last stage in our comprehension of the universe. The gradual comprehension is itself a process, and to pass beyond that form must be impossible while any further steps remain to be taken.
I am not, of course, trying to argue that there is such a reconciliation, or that there is the slightest positive evidence to prove that there can be one. As I have tried to show, the eternal realisation of the Absolute Idea, and the existence of change and evil, are, for us as we are, absolutely incompatible, nor can we even imagine a way in which they
