Yet there is a difference in the measure of contradiction at different stages of thought. It is always greatest when there is least to be opposed about. The more meagre an idea, a creed, a term of thought, the more violent the antitheses to it. The more abstractly we hold a doctrine, the more readily are we disposed to sniff opposition. And as in more concrete belief, so in the more abstract terms of thought. They seem so wide apart--like 'Is' and 'Is not'--and yet, taken alone, they are really so ready to recoil into one another. As thought deepens, contradiction takes a more modified form. The relativity of things becomes apparent: and what were erewhile opposed as contradictory, turn out as pairs of correlatives, neither of which is fully what it professed to be, unless it also is all that seemed reserved for the other. Lastly, and in the full truth of development, progress is seen to be not merely a sudden recoil from one abstraction to another, nor merely a continual reference to an underlying correlative, but the movement of one totality which advances by self-opposition, self-reconciliation, and self-reconstruction. In this stage, the weight and bulk of unity keeps the contradiction in its place of due subordination. But both elements are equally essential, and if the unity is less palpable in the abstract beginnings, and the divergence less wide at the close, at neither beginning nor close can either be absent. But if we merely look at the differentiation or negation involved in the action of reason, we miss the half of its meaning: and the new statement is as one-sided as the old. We have not grasped the full meaning until we see that what, as understanding, affirmed a finite, denies, as dialectic, the absoluteness or adequacy of that finite. Both the partial views have a right to exist, because each gives its contribution to the science of truth.[8] If we penetrate behind the surface,--if we do not look at the two steps in the process abstractly and in separation,--it will be seen that these two elements coincide and unite. But we must be careful here. This coincidence or identification of opposites has not annihilated their opposition or difference. That difference subsists, but in abeyance, reduced to an element or 'moment' in the unity. Each of the two elements has been modified by the union: and thus when each issues from the unity it has a richer significance than it had before. This unity, in which difference is lost and found, is the rational notion,--the speculative grasp of thought. It is the product of experience,--the ampler affirmative which is founded upon an inclusion of negatives.