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Rh tithetic the materialists, considered as the representative monists, and the spiritualists, considered as the representative dualists: whereas everyone knows that there have been materialists who were also pluralists (some of the pre-Socratics, for example), and spiritualists who were also monists (Berkeley, for example). The Hegelians, in short, are too ready to consider certain concepts as antithetic, and then to make valiant efforts to reconcile antitheses which needed only to be unmasked.

But disregarding these matters of method, for which the Hegelian mind has no liking, it is difficult in any case to accept the Hegelian dialectic as a metaphysical explanation of the world. If Hegel had limited himself to the introduction of the idea of motion into our conception of the universe, all would have been well; but when he attempts to represent the marche des choses as a pursuit of antitheses and of syntheses which give way to new antitheses, transcended in their turn by new syntheses—and so on in rhythmic perpetuity—we cannot help wondering that men of genius, including Hegel himself, should really have believed that the world was made in such a fashion, by dint of the actions and reactions of abstract concepts. For we must remind ourselves once in a while that the mere attribution of the adjective concrete to an ethereal abstraction and the mere assertion that the range of cer-