118 THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY
groups is born the series, and from the dialectic move- ment of the series is born the whole system.
Apply this method to the categories of political economy, and you will have the logic and the meta- physics of political economy, or, in other words, you wil! have the economic categories, known to all the world, translated into an almost unknown language, which will give them the appearance of having been freshly hatched in a head of pure reason, so much do these categories seem to engender the one the other, to enchain and en- tangle the one in the other by the sole labor of the dialectic movement. Let not the reader be alarmed by these metaphysics with all their scaffolding of categories, of groups, of series and of systems. M. Proudhon, in spite of the great trouble he has taken to scale the height of the system of contradictions, has never been able to raise himself above the two first steps of simple thesis and antithesis, and yet he has bestridden them twice only, and out of the twice he has once tumbled back- wards.
Up to the present we have only explained the dialectic of Hegel. We will see later how M. Proudhon has succeeded in reducing it to the most paltry proportions. Thus for Hegel, all which has passed and which still passes is exactly that which passes in his own reasoning. Thus the philosophy of history is only the history of philosophy, of his own philosophy. There is no longer “history according to the order of time”; there is only “the succession of ideas in the understanding.” He thinks to construct the world by the movement of thought, while all that he does is to reconstruct systematically, and range under the absolute method, the thoughts which are in the heads of everybody.
