Truth, then, is self-revelation or development. Not a result which is to be accepted, bowed to, and reverenced: but the result issuing (and only valuable as issuing) from a process in which we and objectivity are fellow-workers. The truth may no doubt be presented--as Spinoza does present it--in definitions, stating the net result as fundamental fact. Fundamental fact it is; but as so stated, as Substance, it comes as a stranger, almost as an enemy: the great vision, suddenly offered to untrained eyes, overwhelms and alarms the living sense of self, of personality. Hegel wishes to show it as a friend, as our very own,--as Subject (but not merely subject). It is for this that philosophy runs through its cycle and returns into itself. Man points to nature and nature to man: universal to individual: thought to things: the self to God, and God to the human soul. [Footnote 1: Hegel, _Werke_, ii. 14.] [Footnote 2: Spinoza, _Eth._ Def. 3.] [Footnote 3: Spin. _De inteil. Em._ i. 10.] [Footnote 4: Spin. _Eth._ v. 35.] [Footnote 5: _Eth._ i. 17 schol.] CHAPTER XXV. REASON AND THE DIALECTIC OF UNDERSTANDING. Representative conceptions, besides being the burden of our ordinary materialising consciousness, are also the data of science, accepted and developed in their consequences. Because they are so accepted, as given into our hand, scientific reasoning can only institute relations between them. Its business as thus conceived is progressive unification, comparing objects with one another, demonstrating the similarities which exist between them, and combining them with each other. The exercise of thought which deals with such objects is limited by their existence: it is only formal. It is finite thought, because it is only subjective: it begins at a given point and stops somewhere, and never gets quite round its materials so as to call them truly its own. Each of the objects on which it is turned seems to be outside of it, and independent of it. Each point of fact, again, when it is carried out to its utmost, meets with other thoughts which limit it, and claim to be equally self-centred. Such knowledge creeps on from point to point. To this thinking German philosophy from the time of Kant and Jacobi applied a name, which since the days of Coleridge has been translated by 'Understanding'[1]. This degree or mode of thinking --not a faculty of thought--is the systematised and thorough exercise of what in England is called 'Common Sense.' In the first place, it is synonymous with practical intelligence. It takes what it calls facts, or things, as given, and aims only at arranging and combining them and drawing from them counsels of prudence or rules of art. Seeing things on a superficies, as it were so many unconnected points, here itself and there the various things of the world, it tries to bring them into connexion. It accepts existing distinctions, and seeks to render them more precise by pointing out and sifting the elements of sameness.