The philosophy of Hegel derives its power from the way in which it strikes what, as I have already said, was the key-note of the nineteenth-century philosophy. In the first place, it is a philosophy of reconciliation, which attempts, through a criticism of the oppositions of philosophical theory, to reach a point of view in which they are all seen to be subordinated to the unity of one principle. His attack upon the “law of contradiction,” as formulated by scholastic logicians, meant simply that absolute distinctions are unmeaning, and that the only real differences are differences within a unity. On this principle he tried to show that all the oppositions of thought and things which have found expression in philosophy are relative oppositions, which find a solution or reconciliation in the life and movement of the whole. Hence he maintained that in all the great controversies that have divided the world, in metaphysics and psychology, in ethics and theology, the combatants have really been co-operators. Both sides, to use the expression of Leibnitz, have been “right in what they affirmed and wrong only in what they denied.” And their conflict has been the means of the evolution of a fuller truth than that which was contained in the doctrine of either party. In the second place, Hegel is guided throughout by the conception of the universe—and, in a sense, of every even relatively independent existence in it—as an organism, every element in which implies the whole, every change in which is a phase of its self-evolution. For his logical doctrine of the “_notion_” (as _Begriff_ is commonly translated) means simply that we do not see anything truly until we comprehend it as a whole, in which one principle manifests itself through all the difference of the parts and—just through their distinctions and their relations—binds itself into one individual—reality. In this sense, everything just so far as it has an independent individual existence at all is an organism. Lastly, while thus conceiving the universe as organic, Hegel maintained that it is not a natural but a spiritual organism. For the limited scope of a natural organism and its process cannot be regarded as commensurate with a universe, which comprehends all existence, whether classed as organic or inorganic. Only the conscious and self-conscious unity of mind can overreach and overcome such extreme antagonisms, and reduce them all to elements in the realization of its own life. We must, therefore, think of the universe as an organism which includes nature, but manifests its ultimate principle only in the life of man. We may add that in all this Hegel attempted to show that he was only working out in the sphere of speculative thought what Christianity had already expressed for the ordinary consciousness, according to its half-pictorial methods of representation.