Hegel's logic,[141] though it involves inquiries which custom regards as metaphysical, is not to be characterized as a metaphysic with a method. It is logic or a rationale of thought by thought, with a full development among other matters of all that the most separatist of logicians regards as thought forms. It offers a solution of what has throughout appeared as the logical problem. That solution lies doubtless in the evolution of the Idea, i.e. an all-inclusive in which mere or pure thought is cancelled in its separateness by a transfiguration, while logic is nothing but the science of the Idea viewed in the medium of pure thought. But, whatever else it be, this _Panlogismus_, to use the word of J. E. Erdmann, is at least a logic. Thought in its progressive unfolding, of which the history of philosophy taken in its broad outline offers a pageant, necessarily cannot find anything external to or alien from itself, though that there is something external for it is another matter. As Fichte's Ego finds that its _non-ego_ springs from and has its home within its very self, so with Hegel thought finds itself in its "other," both subsisting in the Idea which is both and neither. Either of the two is the all, as, for example, the law of the convexity of the curve is the law of the curve and the law of its concavity. The process of the development of the Idea or Absolute is in one regard the immanent process of the all. Logically regarded, i.e. "in the medium of mere thought," it is dialectical method. Any abstract and limited point of view carries necessarily to its contradictory. This can only be atoned with the original determination by fresh negation in which a new thought-determination is born, which is yet in a sense the old, though enriched, and valid on a higher plane. The limitations of this in turn cause a contradiction to emerge, and the process needs repetition. At last, however, no swing into the opposite, with its primarily conflicting, if ultimately complementary function, is any longer possible. That in which no further contradiction is possible is the absolute Idea. Bare or indeterminate being, for instance, the first of the determinations of Hegel's logic, as the being of that which is not anything determinate, of Kant's thing-in-itself, for example, positively understood, implicated at once the notion of not-being, which negates it, and is one with it, yet with a difference, so that we have the transition to determinate being, the transition being baptized as becoming. And so forth. It is easy to raise difficulties not only in regard to the detail in Hegel's development of his categories, especially the higher ones, but also in regard to the essential rhythm of his method. The consideration that mere double negation leaves us precisely where we were and not upon a higher plane where the dominant concept is richer, is, of course, fatal only to certain verbal expressions of Hegel's intent. There is a differentiation