appears at times inclined to suggest, against attempting to make the future an improvement on the past. But the very fact that, he has gone too far in his application of the idea that the dialectic is timeless makes it more clear that he did hold that idea.
There are not, I believe, any expressions in the Logic which can be fairly taken as suggesting the development of the dialectic. It is true that two successive categories are named Life and Cognition, and that science informs us that Life existed in this world before Cognition. But the names of the categories must be taken as those of the phenomena in which the idea in question shows most clearly, and not as indicating the only form in which the idea can show itself at all. Otherwise we should be led to the impossible result that Notions, Judgments, and Syllogisms existed before Cognition.
The strongest expression of the eternal nature of the process is to be found in the Encyclopædia (§212, Lecture Note). “Die Vollführung des unendlichen Zwecks ist so nur die Täuschung aufzuheben, als ob er noch nicht vollführt sey. Das Gute, das absolut Gute, vollbringt sich ewig in der Welt, und das Resultat ist, dass es sich an und für sich vollbracht ist und nicht erst auf uns zu warten braucht.”
Another important piece of evidence is his treatment of his own maxim: “All that is real is rational”. To the objections to this he replies, firstly, by saying that reality does not mean the surface of things, but something deeper behind them. Besides- this he admits occasionally, though apparently not always, that contingency has rights within a sphere of its own where reason cannot demand that everything should be explained. But he never tries to meet the attacks made on his principle by drawing a distinction between the irrational reality of the present and the rational reality of the future. Such a distinction would be so natural and obvious, and would, for those who could consistently make use of it, so completely remove the charge of a false optimism about the present, that we can scarcely doubt that Hegel’s neglect of it was due to the fact that he saw it to be incompatible with his principles.
Hegel’s treatment of time, moreover, confirms this view. For he considers it merely as a stage in the Philosophy of Nature, which is only an application of the Logic. Now if the realisation of the categories of the Logic only took place in time, time would be an element in the universe, correlative with the Logic, and of equal importance in it.
