and that it has not yet been found implies nothing more than that the world, considered as a process, has not yet worked out its full meaning.
But we must admit that the actual result is rather damaging to the prospects of Hegehanism. We may, as I have tried to show, be sure that, if Hegel’s dialectic is true, then such a synthesis must be possible, because it is the only way of harmonising all the facts. At the same time, the fact that the dialectic cannot be true, unless some synthesis which we do not know, and whose nature we cannot even conceive, relieves it from an obstacle which would otherwise be fatal, certainly lessens the chance that it is true, even if no error in it has yet been discovered. For our only right to accept such an extreme hypothesis. lies in the impossibility of finding any other way out of the dilemma. And the more violent the consequences to which an argument leads us, the greater is the antecedent probability that some flaw has been left undetected.
Not only does such a theory lose the strength which comea from the successful solution of all problems presented to it, but it is compelled to rely, with regard to this particular proposition, on a possibihty which we cannot at present fully grasp, even in imagination, and the realisation of which would perhaps involve the transcending of all discursive thought. Under these circumstances it is clear that our confidence in Hegel’s system must be considerably less than that which was possessed by its author, who had not reahsed the tentative and incomplete condition to which this problem inevitably reduced his position.
The result of these considerations, however, is perhaps on the whole more positive than negative. They can scarcely urge us to more careful scrutiny of all the details of the dialectic than would be required in any case by the complexity of the problems which the latter presents. And, on the other hand, they do supply us, as it seems to me, with a ground for beheving that neither time nor imperfection forms an insuperable objection to the dialectic. If the latter is not valid in itself, we shall in any case have no right to believe it. And if it is vahd in itself, we shall not only be entitled, but we shall be bound, to believe that one more synthesis remains as yet unknown to us, which shall overcome the last and most persistent of the contradictions inherent in appearance.
