Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/128

112 reality to what was in fact merely a correction of method.

And if you do not like my first interpretation, here is my second. The Hegelian dialectic is a sort of historic law, a theory of the manner in which social forms or scientific theories succeed each other. It amounts to saying this: that an exaggerated assertion is usually succeeded by an assertion which exaggerates in the opposite direction, without regard to the restrictions which in part justify the original assertion; and that these two contrary assertions then give place to a third, which takes account of the modicum of truth contained in each of the first two, and consolidates them by reestablishing the tacit restrictions and suppressing the exaggerations. It amounts, in short, to saying that it takes two opposite errors to establish a truth. This generalization, which could be amply instanced, is of the same order as Comte's law of the three states, and constitutes a similarity between Hegelianism and positivism. Both of these laws, though they refer to entirely different classes of facts, simplify to a high degree; but roughly, and within certain limits, they do represent the movement of the history of ideas. They afford material, then, rather for the psychology of philosophers or of scientists than for philosophy itself, as the Hegelians would have us believe.

In short, the choice lies between the hypothesis