=Hegel’s Application of his Theory.= Formulating his theory in 1800, Hegel spent the most of his literary career in exemplifying it. The _Phänomenologie_ (1807) is an attempt to show the natural history of thought in experience. He shows there the series of stages through which the mind passes,――stages corresponding to logic, to the growth of the individual, and to society. In the dialectic movement, consciousness views the world in an external way until it becomes self-conscious; then reason is evolved as a synthesis of the two: _i. e._ of external consciousness and self-consciousness. Reason then develops by continually turning back upon itself into an ethical, religious, and, lastly, an absolute reason. Hegel wrote his _Logic_ (1812) as an application of his theory to thought――regarding thought as consisting of general concepts. Then came his _Encyclopædia_ (1816), containing his _Philosophy of Nature_ and _Philosophy of Mind_. In his _Philosophy of Nature_, nature is regarded as revealing the same dialectic as logic, but in the external world. Nature, therefore, stands to logic as its antithesis. The _Philosophy of Mind_ places mind as the synthesis of logic and nature, and elaborates the subject as mind, objective mind, and the synthesis of the two, or Absolute mind. Thus the dialectic of the _Logic_ is repeated and applied to the _Philosophy of Nature_ and the _Philosophy of Spirit_. Logic and history are therefore parallel. The content is always the same in both; and the development is always in logical forms. The Absolute Idea by differentiation with itself comes to itself: (1) in Logic through Being, Essence, and Idea; (2) in Nature through matter, individual forms, and organism; (3) in Spirit through consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, right, morality, social morality, art, religion, philosophy. Logic is the Spirit _an-sich_; nature is the spirit _für-sich_; mind is the Spirit _an-und-für-sich_. CHAPTER XII THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE THING-IN-ITSELF