Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/121

] in time as ultimate as the dialectic itself, and by making time ultimate it cuts itself off from all attempts to reduce time to something else. The proper inference from this antinomy is not that time must be either finite or infinite, and we must choose one and close our eyes to the difficulties it involves, but that there is something wrong about the conception of time which renders it unfit for an ultimate metaphysical explanation of the world. That, indeed, would be the conclusion demanded by the procedure of the dialectic elsewhere. These objections would apply equally to any idealistic system that adopted a time-process as an original element; but there is one peculiar to the dialectic, due to the fact that the highest term in which it ends must be the presupposition of all the lower terms. The dialectic is not an actual advance, but only one from an abstraction to the concrete whole from which abstraction was made. But if the time-process corresponds to the thought-process we shall have to admit that at a given time the world might consist of unreconciled contradictions, i.e., would not be rational. And again if contradictions could be true, the dialectic would lose all force, and there would not be any motive driving us from thesis and antithesis to a synthesis that reconciled the contradiction. Moreover, unless reality always corresponds to the Absolute Idea, the Dialectic cannot meet Trendelenburg's objection that it either follows from the original premiss and tells us nothing new, or, if it introduces something new, it does not follow from the admission of the original premiss. This can be answered only if we suppose the Absolute Idea to be present in the mind throughout, and so to start the process.—Nor can the idea of a development in time really be supported by Hegel's own language. The fact that the dialectic is applied to the philosophy of history, may be explained by its being the key to the universe, and remaining so also when it is viewed under the aspect of time. Moreover, if H. had really meant a temporal interpretation, he would not have come so near as he does to deprecating all effort to remove an imperfection of which he denies the reality. Nor does he adopt the facile answer to the objections to his maxim that the real is rational, which would lie in the distinction between the irrational reality of the present and the rational reality of the future. H.'s neglect of a distinction which would so completely remove the charge of a false optimism about the present shows that he must have seen it to be inconsistent with his principles. Lastly, if the realization of the categories only took place in time, time would have to be coordinated with the Logic as