The deeper reason why Hegel invests contradiction with a positive value lies in the fact that, since the nature of everything involves the union of discrepant elements, nothing can bear isolation and independence.  Terms, processes, epochs, institutions, depend upon one another for their meaning, expression, and existence; it is impossible to take anything in isolation.  But this is just what one does in dealing with the world in art or in science, in religion or in business; one is always dealing with error and contradiction, because one is dealing with fragments or bits of life and experience.  Hence—­and this is Hegel’s crowning thought—­anything short of the whole universe is inevitably contradictory.  In brief, contradiction has the same sting for Hegel as it has for any one else.  Without losing its nature of “contradictoriness,” contradiction has logically this positive meaning.  Since it is an essential element of every partial, isolated, and independent view of experience and thought, one is necessarily led to transcend it and to see the universe in organic wholeness.

Thus, as Hegel puts his fundamental idea, “the truth is the whole.”  Neither things nor categories, neither histories nor religions, neither sciences nor arts, express or exhaust by themselves the whole essence of the universe.  The essence of the universe is the life of the totality of all things, not their sum.  As the life of man is not the sum of his bodily and mental functions, the whole man being present in each and all of these, so must the universe be conceived as omnipresent in each of its parts and expressions.  This is the significance of Hegel’s conception of the universe as an organism.  The World-Spirit—­Hegel’s God—­constitutes, thinks, lives, wills, and is all in unity.  The evolution of the universe is thus the evolution of God himself.

The task of philosophy, then, as Hegel conceives it, is to portray in systematic form the evolution of the World-Spirit in all its necessary ramifications.  These ramifications themselves are conceived as constituting complete wholes, such as logic, nature, mind, society, history, art, religion, philosophy, so that the universe in its onward march through these is represented as a Whole of Wholes—­ein Kreis von Kreisen.  In Hegel’s complete philosophy each of these special spheres finds its proper place and elaborate treatment.

Whether Hegel has well or ill succeeded in the task of exhibiting in each and all of these spheres the one universal movement, whether or no he was justified in reading into logic the same kind of development manifested by life, or in making life conform to one logical formula—­these and other problems should arouse an interest in Hegel’s writings.  The following selections may give some glimpse of their spirit.