Still there can be no doubt that the Dialectic of reason is dangerous, if taken abstractly and as if it were a whole truth. For the thoughts of ordinary men tend to be more abstract than their materials warrant. Men seek to formulate their feelings, faith, and conduct: but the _rationale_ of their inmost belief,--their creed,--is generally narrower than it might be. Out of the undecomposed and massive 'substance,' on which their life and conduct is founded, they extract one or two ingredients: they emphasise with undue stress one or two features in their world, and attach to these partial formulae a value which would be deserved only if they really represented the whole facts. Hence when the narrow outlines of their creed are submitted to dialectic,--when the inlying contradictions are exposed, men feel as if the system of the world had sunk beneath them. But it is not the massive structure of their world, the organic unity in which they live, that is struck by dialectic: it is only those luminous points, the representative terms of material thought, which float before their consciousness, and which have been formulated in hard and fast outlines by the understanding. These points, as so defined and exaggerated, are what dialectic shakes. Not an alien force, but the inherent power of thought, destroys the temporary constructions of the understanding. The infinite comes to show the inadequacy of the finite which it has made. In philosophy this second stage is as essential as the first. The one-sidedness of the first abstraction is corrected by the one-sidedness of the other. In the Philosophy of Plato, as has been noted, the dialectical energy of thought is sometimes spoken of under the analogy of sexual passion--the Love which, in the words of Sophocles, 'falls upon possessions' and makes all fixed ordinance of no account, and finds no obstacles insuperable to its strong desire. But Love, as the speaker explains, is a child of Wealth and Want: he is never poor, and never rich: he is in a mean between ignorance and knowledge[7]. Thus is described the active unrest of growth, the '_inquietude poussante_,' as Leibniz called it,--the quickening force of the negative and of contradiction.