Each exposition or perception of the synthesis by the philosopher restores or re-affirms the unity which in the divided energies of the period, in its progressive, reforming, and reactionary aspects, in its differentiating time, had to a great extent been lost. By the reforming, progressive, and scientific movement of which each period is full, the unity or totality with which it began is shown to be defective. The value of the initial synthesis is impaired; its formula is found inadequate to comprehend the totality: and the differences which that unity involved, or which were implicitly in it, are now explicitly affirmed. But the bent towards unity is a natural law making itself felt even in the period of differentiation. And it makes itself felt in the pain of contradiction, of discord, of broken harmony. And that pain--which is the sign of an ever-present life that refuses to succumb to the encroaching elements--is the stimulus to re-construction. Only so far as pain ceases to be pain, as it benumbs, and deadens, does it involve stagnation: as pain proper, felt as resistance to an inner implicitly victorious principle, it stimulates and quickens to efforts to make life whole again. The integrating principle is present and active. There is then an effort, a re-action; the feeling has to do something to make itself outwardly felt: the implicit has to be actually put in its place, forced as it were into action and set forth[3]: and the existing contrasts and differences which the re-forming agency has called into vigorous life are lifted from their isolation, and show of independence, and kept, as it were, suspended in the unity[4]. The differences are not lost or annihilated: but they come back to a centre, they find themselves, as it were, at home: they lose their unfair prominence and self-assertion, and sink into their places as constituents in the embracing organism[5]. The unity which comes is not however the same as the unity which disappeared, however much it may seem so. The mere _notion_--the inner sense and inner unity--has put itself forward into the real world: it is no longer a mere subjective principle, but as moulded into actuality, into the objective world, it has become an Idea. (_Begriff_ is now _Idee._) For the Idea is always more than a notion: it is a notion translated into objectivity, and yet in objectivity not sinking into a mere congeries of independent parts, but retaining them 'ideally'--united by links of thought and service--in its larger ideal-reality. It is all that the object ought to be (and which in a sense it must be, if it is at all), and all that the subject sought to be and looked forward to.