This, then, is why I conceive Hegel—entirely apart from the value of any special results—to represent the quintessence of the scientific spirit. He denies not only the possibility of getting truth out of a formal, apart thought, but he denies the existence of any faculty of thought which is other than the expression of fact itself. His contention is not that “thought,” in the scholastic sense, has ontological validity, but that fact, reality is significant. Even, then, if it were shown that Hegel is pretty much all wrong as to the special meanings which he finds to make up the significance of reality, his main principle would be unimpeached until it were shown that fact has not a systematic, or interconnected, meaning, but is a mere hodgepodge of fragments. Whether the scientific spirit would have any interest in such a hodgepodge may, at least, be questioned. Having dealt at such length with the first reason why as yet the “transcendental” movement has found no overt coalescence with the scientific, we may deal briefly with the remaining reason.[3] In the second place, then, the rationality of fact had not been sufficiently realised in detail in the early decades of the century to admit of the principle of the “transcendental” movement being otherwise than misunderstood. That is to say, the development and, more particularly, the application of science to the specific facts of the world was then comparatively rudimentary. On account of this lack of scientific discovery and application, the world presented itself to man’s consciousness as a blank, or at least as only stuff _for_ meaning, and not as itself significant. The result was that Hegel must be interpreted subjectively. The difficulties in the way of conceiving a world, upon which science had not yet expended its energies in detail, as an organism of significant relations and bearings were so great, that Hegel’s attempt to point out these significant types and functions as immanent in reality was inevitably misconstrued as an attempt, on Hegel’s part, to prove that a system of purely “subjective” thoughts could somehow be so manipulated as to give objectively valid results.