Where you meet with a contradiction among realities, Herbart used to say, it shows you have failed to make a real distinction. Hegel's sovereign method of going to work and saving all possible contradictions, lies in pertinaciously refusing to distinguish. He takes what is true of a term _secundum quid_, treats it as true of the same term _simpliciter_, and then, of course, applies it to the term _secundum aliud_. A {281} good example of this is found in the first triad. This triad shows that the mutability of the real world is due to the fact that being constantly negates itself; that whatever _is_ by the same act _is not_, and gets undone and swept away; and that thus the irremediable torrent of life about which so much rhetoric has been written has its roots in an ineluctable necessity which lies revealed to our logical reason. This notion of a being which forever stumbles over its own feet, and has to change in order to exist at all, is a very picturesque symbol of the reality, and is probably one of the points that make young readers feel as if a deep core of truth lay in the system. But how is the reasoning done? Pure being is assumed, without determinations, being _secundum quid_. In this respect it agrees with nothing. Therefore _simpliciter_ it is nothing; wherever we find it, it is nothing; crowned with complete determinations then, or _secundum aliud_, it is nothing still, and _hebt sich auf_. It is as if we said, Man without his clothes may be named 'the naked.' Therefore man _simpliciter_ is the naked; and finally man with his hat, shoes, and overcoat on is the naked still.