But if this be the method of real development, in the growth of nature, and the progress of history, it is also the method of that supreme product of historical progress, the spirit and system of philosophy. Thought, also, the culminating stage in which the spirit of man becomes conscious of itself and of its universe, will move or grow on the same lines as that of which it is the comprehension and theory. It will begin at the two ends, and each beginning will complete and presuppose the other. Nature will suppose and yet lead up to Spirit or Mind: Spirit or Mind will throw light on the mystery of Nature: Being will point to knowledge or Idea; and Idea show itself the basis of Being. Or, if we consider the triple division of the philosophic system, as it runs in Hegel's _Encyclopaedia_, we can see how misleading it may be to take that one order as absolute. To understand it thoroughly we must begin with each of the three in turn: so as thus to realise that each does not except figuratively succeed the other, but that in each an aspect of the whole truth is presented which had been put by the other parts somewhat in the background. In each part there is a definition and a revelation of the Absolute. But each is also, as it were, a projection, a perspective view, a condensed or expanded image of the other. In each the Absolute is one and whole, in some more veiled, more restricted, and more meagre than in others; but the veil, and the restriction, and the emptying, are self-imposed: and for that reason the veil is really transparent, the restriction is negatived, and the emptying is not only a self-humiliating but a self-ennobling irony--the irony of the Absolute. [Footnote 1: Of course the term 'equilibrium' may be used loosely to mean a great deal more than this,--how much will depend on the context. These quasi-mathematical analyses have great fascination: their apparent simplicity imposes upon us.] [Footnote 2: The distinction, it will be observed, lies between the method of mathematical physics and that of physics which has learned something from the researches of electricity or chemistry. If the method or principles of chemistry are thus said to be reduced to those of physics, this is because the conceptions of physics have been revolutionised from the side of chemistry, &c., and even of biology. This tendency of modern science is precisely in the line indicated by Schelling and Hegel.] [Footnote 3: _Problems of Life and Mind_, iii. p. 58.] [Footnote 4: _Eth._ vii. 7 ὁ νοῡς ἀρχή: 6. 6 νοῡς ἐστι τῶν ἀρχῶν.]