To this rhythmical movement Hegel has appropriated the name of Dialectic. The name came in the first instance from Kant, but ultimately from Plato, where it denotes the process which brings the 'many' under the 'one,' and divides the 'one' into the 'many.' But how, it may be asked, does difference spring up, if we begin with unity, and how do the differences return into the unity? In other words, given a universal, how are we ever to get at particulars, and how will these particulars ever give rise to a real individual? Such is the problem, in the technical language of the Logic of the 'Notion.' And we may answer, that the unity or universal in question is either a true and adequate or an imperfect unity. In the latter case it is a mere unit, amid other units, bound to them and serving to recall them by relations of contrast, complement, similarity. It is one of many,--a subordinate member in a congeries, and not _the One_. If, on the contrary, it be a true Unity, it is a concrete universal,--the parent of perpetual variety. The unity, if it be its genuine shape which is formulated by philosophers, is not mere monotony without differences. If it is a living and real Idea, containing a complex inter-action of principles: it is not a single line of action, but the organic confluence of several. No one single principle by itself is enough to state a life, a character, or a period. But as the unity comes before the eye of the single thinker, it is seldom or never grasped with all its fulness of life and difference. The whole synthesis, although it is implicitly present and underlies experience and life as its essential basis, is not consciously apprehended, but for the most part taken on one side only, one emphatic aspect into which it has concentrated itself. And even if the master could grasp the whole, could see the unity of actuality in all its differences, (and we may doubt whether any man or any philosopher can thus incarnate the prerogative of reason,) his followers and the popular mind would not imitate him. While his grasp of comprehension may possibly have been thorough, though he may have seen life whole through all its differences, inequalities, and schisms, and with all these reduced or idealised to their due proportions, into the unity beyond, the crowd who follow him are soon compelled to lay exclusive stress on some one side of his theory. Some of them see the totality from one aspect, some from another. It is indeed the whole which in a certain sense they see: but it is the whole narrowed down to a point. While _his_ theory was a comprehensive and concrete grasp, including and harmonising many things which seem otherwise wide apart, theirs is abstract and inadequate: it fixes on a single point, which is thus withdrawn from its living and meaning-giving context, and left as an empty name. Now it is the very nature of popular reasoning to tend to abstractions, in this sense of the word. Popular