It is not surprising that, starting from such premises, and reasoning after this fashion, Hegel finds his way to strange conclusions. Out of _space_ and _time_ he proceeds to build up _motion_, _matter_, _repulsion_, _attraction_, _weight_, and _inertia_. He then goes on to logically evolve the solar system. In doing this he widely diverges from the Newtonian theory; reaches by syllogism the conviction that the planets are the most perfect celestial bodies; and, not being able to bring the stars within his theory, says that they are mere formal existences and not living matter, and that as compared with the solar system they are as little admirable as a cutaneous eruption or a swarm of flies.[1] Results so absurd might be left as self-disproved, were it not that speculators of this class are not alarmed by any amount of incongruity with established beliefs. The only efficient mode of treating systems like this of {14} Hegel, is to show that they are self-destructive—that by their first steps they ignore that authority on which all their subsequent steps depend. If Hegel professes, as he manifestly does, to develop his scheme by reasoning—if he presents successive inferences as _necessarily following_ from certain premises; he implies the postulate that a belief which necessarily follows after certain antecedents is a true belief; and did an opponent reply to one of his inferences that, though it was impossible to think the opposite, yet the opposite was true, he would consider the reply irrational. The procedure, however, which he would thus condemn as destructive of all thinking whatever, is just the procedure exhibited in the enunciation of his own first principles. Mankind find themselves unable to conceive that there can be thought without things thought of. Hegel, however, asserts that there _can_ be thought without things thought of. That ultimate test of a true proposition—the inability of the human mind to conceive the negation of it—which in all the successive steps of his arguments he considers valid, he considers invalid where it suits his convenience to do so; and yet at the same time denies the right of an opponent to follow his example. If it is competent for him to posit dogmas which are the direct negations of what human consciousness recognizes; then is it also competent for his antagonists to stop him at any moment by saying, that though the particular inference he is drawing seems to his mind, and to all minds, necessarily to follow from the premises, yet it is not true, but the contrary inference is true. Or, to state the dilemma in another form:—If he sets out with inconceivable propositions, then may he with equal propriety make all his succeeding propositions inconceivable ones—may at every step throughout his reasoning draw the opposite conclusion to that which seems involved.