thought wants the time and perseverance necessary to retain a whole truth, and so is contented with a partial image. It seeks for simple and sharp precision: it likes to have something distinctly before it, visible to the eye of imagination, and capable of being stated in a clear and unambiguous formula for the intellect. And popular thought--the dogmatic insistence on one-sided truth--is not confined to the so-called non-philosophic world: just as, on the other hand, the inclusive and comprehensive unity of life and reality is seen and felt and recognised by many--and felt by them first--who have no claim to the technical rank of philosophers. Popular thought is the thought which skims the surface of reality, which addresses itself to the level of opinion prevalent in all members of the mass as such, and does not go beyond that into the ultimate and complex depths of experience. Thus it comes about that the concrete or adequate synthesis which should have appeared in the self-conscious thought of the period, when it reflected upon what it was, has been replaced by a narrow and one-sided formula, an abstract and formal universal, a universal which does not express all the particulars. One predominant side of the synthesis steals the place of the total: what should have been a comprehensive universal has lowered itself into a particular. Not indeed the same particular as existed before the union: because it has been influenced by the synthesis, so as to issue with a new colouring, as if it had been steeped in a fresh liquid. But still it is really a particular: and as such, it evokes a new particular in antagonism to it and exhibiting an element latent in the synthesis. If the first side of the antithesis which claims unduly to be the total, or universal, be called Conservative, the second must be called Reforming or Progressive. If the first step is Dogmatic, the second is Sceptical. If the one side assumes to be the whole, the other practically refutes the assumption. If the one agency clings blindly to the unity,--as when pious men rally round the central idea of religion, the other as tenaciously and narrowly holds to the difference,--as when science displays the struggle for existence and the empire of chance among the myriads of aimless organisms. They are two warring abstractions, each in a different direction. But as they are the offspring of one parent,--as they have each in their own way narrowed the whole down to a point, it cannot but be that when they evolve or develop all that is in them, they will ultimately coincide, and complete each other. The contradiction will not disappear until it has been persistently worked out,--when each opposing member which was potentially a total has become what it was by its own nature destined to be. And this disappearance of the antithesis is the reappearance of the unity in all its strength, reinforced with all the wealth of new distinctions.