The most portentous thing about Hegel's philosophy is this notion of the world's having, so to speak, argued itself into existence. To rationalise the sum of being, to explain, without assumptions, why there should be anything, and then why it should be as we know it, had been a problem suggested by Plato and solved rather summarily by Spinoza's challenge to conceive Infinite Power as non-existing. Hegel is more patient and ingenious; but, after all, his superiority merely consists in spinning the web of arbitrary dialectic so fine that we can hardly see the thread. The root-idea is to identify, or rather to confuse, causal evolution with logic. The chain of causes and effects that constitutes the universe is made out to be one with the series of reasons and consequents by which the conclusion is demonstrated. As usual, the equation is effected by a transference of terms from each side to the other. The categories and processes of logic are credited with a life and movement that belongs only to the human reasoner operating with them. And the moving, interacting masses of which the material universe consists are represented as parties to a dialectical {115} discussion in which one denies what the other asserts until it is discovered, on lifting the argument to a higher plane, that after all they are agreed. Nor is this all. The world as we know it is composed of co-existent elements grouped together or distinguished according to their resemblances and differences as so many natural kinds; and of successive events linked together as causes and effects. But while there is no general law of coexistence except such as may be derived from the collocation of the previously existing elements whence they are derived, there _is_ a law of causal succession--namely, this, that the quantities of mass and energy involved are conserved without loss or gain through all time. Now, Hegel's way of rationalising or, in plainer words, accounting for the coexistent elements and their qualities, is to bring them under a supposed law of complementary opposition, revived from Heracleitus, according to which everything necessarily involves the existence, both in thought and reality, of its contradictory. And the same principle is applied to causal succession--a proceeding which would be fatal to the scientific law of conservation.