'Logic,' says Hegel[4], 'is the science of the Idea in the medium of mere thought.' It exhibits the truth in one partial aspect, or shows one appearance of the total unity of the world,--the aspect it would wear if we could for a moment suppose the reality of Nature to vanish out of sight, and the ideality of Mind reduced to a ghost. It dissects the underlying organisation--the scheme of unification--which the world of mental or spiritual experience presents in all its concreteness. And it does so because it exhibits the last result of the ever clearer and clearer experience which Mind achieves as it comes to see and realise itself. The logical skeleton is the sublimated product of a rich concrete experience. It has been a curious delusion of some who were probably satisfied by a casual glance at Hegel's _Logic_, especially in its earlier chapters, to suppose that the Logic was meant to be the absolute beginning: and that pure or mere thought was the congenital endowment of the heaven-born philosopher[5]. To Hegel, on the contrary, Logic was an abstraction from a fuller, more concrete reality. He did not indeed suppose that the symbolical conception of Movement--in its popular pictorialness--would be an adequate substitute or representative for thought; but he knew that the energy of mental development was the fact, and the truth, of which 'becoming' is a meagre, abstract phase. Logic, then, is not the Science of mere or pure thought, but of the Idea (which is co-terminous with reality)--of the Mind's synthetic unity of experience--looked at, however, abstractly, in the medium of pure thought. Just so, Nature-philosophy is the same Idea, as it turns up bit after bit distracted, fragmentary, and more or less mutilated, in the multiplication, the time and space division, of physical phenomena. But as science requires us to go from the simple to the more complex, as the truth has to prove itself true, by serving in its conclusion as the corroboration of all its premisses or presuppositions; so the system of philosophy begins with the Logic. Yet it can only begin there, because it has already apprehended itself in its completeness: and it can only move onward because it is the concentrated essence--the implicit being--of all that it actually and explicitly is. It may appear to emerge from a point: but that point has at its back the intellectual unity of a philosophy which embraces the world. It presupposes the complete philosopher who shall be the complete organ of absolute intelligence, of universal and eternal Spirit.