Both would be equal elements in a concrete whole. Neither could be looked on as an application of, or deduction from, the other. But the treatment of time merely as one of the phenomena which result from the realisation of the Logic is incompatible with such a theory as this, and we may fairly conclude that time had not for Hegel this ultimate importance.
We have thus arrived at the conclusion that the dialectic is not for Hegel a process in time, but that the Absolute Idea must be looked on as eternally realised. We are very far, however, from having got rid of our difficulties. We seem, indeed, to be brought to a reductio ad absurdum. For if the other theory was incompatible with Hegel, this seems to be incompatible with the facts.
The dialectic process is one from incomplete to complete rationality. If it is eternally fulfilled, then the universe must be completely rational. Now, in the first place, it is certain that the universe is not completely rational for us. We are not able to see everything round us as a manifestation of the Absolute Idea. Even those students of philosophy who believe on general grounds that the Absolute Idea must be manifested in everything are as unable as the rest of us to see how it is manifested in a table or a thunder-storm. We can only explain these things by much lower categories, and we cannot, therefore, explain them completely. Nor are we by any means able to eliminate completely the contingency of the data of sense, without which the categories are void and meaningless, and a universe which contains an ultimately contingent element cannot be held to be completely rational. It would seem, too, that if we are perfectly rational in a perfectly rational universe, there must always be a complete harmony between our desires and our environment. And this, too, is not invariably the case.
But if the universe appears to us not to be perfect, can it be so in reality? Does not the very failure to perceive the perfection destroy it? In the first place, the Absolute Idea, as laid down by Hegel, is one of self-conscious rationality — the Idea to which the Idea itself is “Gegenstand und Objekt” (Encyclopædia, §236). If any part of reality sees anything, except the Absolute Idea, anywhere in reality, this ideal can scarcely be said to have been fulfilled.
And, more generally, if the universe appears to us to be only imperfectly rational, we must be either right or wrong. If we are right, the world is not perfectly rational But if we are wrong, then it is difficult to see how we can be perfectly rational. And we are part of the world. Thus it
