it would be impossible, by mere analysis of a logical category, to deduce the conclusion that for some time it could exist independently, but that after that its imperfection would drive it on to another stage.
It is only on the supposition that reality always corresponds to the Absolute Idea, and is not merely approximating to it, that we can meet another difficulty which is propounded by Trendelenburg. Either, he says, the conclusion of the whole process can be obtained by analysis of the original premise, or it can not. The original premise of the whole process is nothing but the validity of the idea of Pure Being. If the whole conclusion can be got from this, we learn nothing new, and the whole dialectic process is futile. If, on the other hand, we introduce anything not obtained from our original premise, we fail in our object — which was to prove that the whole system followed when that premise was once admitted.
The only escape from this difficulty is to be found in realising that though the validity of the lower category is the only explicit admission required for the process, it is not the only material we have before us. Categories are forms of thought which we apply to reality, and which have no meaning except as so applied. And all reality embodies, as it must do to be self-consistent and free from contradictions, the Absolute Idea, although in many cases when we experience reality much of this is only implicit. In all our consciousness, therefore, we have implicit the whole process and result of the dialectic, although in many cases only few categories are explicitly acknowledged to be valid. And it is the conjunction of the explicit partial truth with the reality which implicitly contains the whole truth, which forces the mind on to a more adequate explicit statement.
This is brought out by Mr. Bradley in his Logic (book iii. part i. chap, ii., §§20 and 21): “An idea prevails that the dialectic method is a sort of experiment with conceptions in vacuo. We are supposed to have nothing but one single isolated abstract idea, and this solitary monad then proceeds to multiply by gemination from or by fission of its private substance, or by fetching matter from the impalpable void. But this is a mere caricature, and it comes from confusion between that which the mind has got before it and that which it has within itself. Before the mind there is a single exception, but the whole mind itself, which does not appear, engages in the process, operates on the datum and produces the result. The opposition between the real, in that fragmentary character in which the mind possesses it, and the
