Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/576

566 of the system of Hegel in particular. It is true that he nowhere expressly supplies this analysis, but it is implied in the whole tenor of his speculations. He rather proceeds prematurely to build up into a synthesis the elements of pure thought, which are the result of the analysis. Hence arises, in a great measure, his obscurity, which seems, in many places, to be absolutely impenetrable. Nevertheless, in spite of all its defects, his exposition of the dialectual movement by which the categories of reason evolve themselves, from lowest to highest, through a self-conversion into their opposites, is a work replete at once with the profoundest truth, and the most marvellous speculative sagacity. Retrospectively it affords a solution of the antinomies by which Kant succeeded in bewildering the reason of his contemporaries, and it extinguishes, by anticipation, the resurrection of these same sceptical perplexities which certain philosophers in this country have of late endeavoured to bring about.

But it is in the analysis referred to that the philosophy of Hegel, and of Germany in general, finds its most signal contrast in the philosophy of Great Britain. Of the analysis in question our philosophers have formed no just or adequate conception. Hence they have misconceived the nature of "the absolute," and have failed altogether in their attempts to refute the philosophy which expounds it. They have supposed that the question concerning "the absolute" was a question which referred to