It was by asking precisely these questions that Hegel gave the finishing strokes to the Kantian philosophy. The starting-point of all valid philosophy must be the perception that the essence of all conscious apprehension is the union of opposites--of which that of subject and object is the most fundamental and all-pervasive. True, before differences can be united they must have been separated, but this merely proves that differentiation or analysis is only one factor in a single process. Equally fundamental is the element of synthesis. Nor is it possible at any point in knowledge to prove the existence of a merely given in whose construction the thinking subject has played no part nor a merely thinking subject in whose structure the object is not an organic factor. In coming, as at a certain point in its development it does, to the consciousness of an object, the mind does not find itself in the presence of an opponent, or of anything essentially alien to itself but of that which gives content and stability to its own existence. True, the stability it seems to find in it is incomplete. The object cannot rest in the form of its immediate appearance without involving us in contradiction. The sun does not "rise," the dew does not "fall." But this only means that the unity between subject and object to which the gift of consciousness commits us is incompletely realized in that appearance: the apparent truth has to submit to correction and supplementation before it can be accepted as real truth. It does not mean that there is anywhere a mere fact which is not also an interpretation nor an interpreting mind whose ideas have no hold upon fact. From this it follows that ultimate or absolute reality is to be sought not beyond the region of experience, but in the fullest and most harmonious statement of the facts of our experience. True a completely harmonious world whether of theory or of practice remains an ideal. But the fact that we have already in part realized the ideal and that the degree in which we have realized it is the degree in which we may regard our experience as trustworthy, is proof that the ideal is no mere idea as Kant taught, but the very substance of reality. Stumbling blocks in Hegel's statements.