unifying of thought, the very abstraction of relativity[4]. In the beginning, then, there is nothing and yet that nothing is. Such is the fundamental antithesis of thought: or the discrepancy which makes itself felt between each several term of thought and the whole Idea of which they are the expression. Being is the term emphasised as absolute by understanding: then the dialectical power, or the consciousness of the whole, steps in to counteract the one-sided element. In other words, thought, the total thought, asks what is Being, mere and simple; and answers mere nothing.[5] The one aspect of the point is as justifiable as the other. In other words the two aspects are indissoluble: they are in one. The term 'Unity,' applied to the relation of Being and Not, may perhaps mislead: and it is therefore better to say that the two points of view are (as Mr. Spencer puts it) at once 'antithetical and inseparable,' An unrelated being, an 'absolute' (i. e. separate and transcendent) reality is an Unknowable, i. e. an ineffable, an unspeakable of which we can legitimately predicate a not- , leaving imagination to fill up the blank after the hyphen. A mere Not, with no substratum which it negatives, is mere Being: and a mere Being, which has no substratum, is a mere Not. The movement upward and the movement downward are here illustrated: and it is evident that they are the same movement[6],--the same unrest, only differentiated as up and down by some _termini_ not yet explicitly brought into view. Each--Is and Not--as it seeks to differentiate itself, to make itself clear, passes into the other. In fact, the very vocation, calling, or notion of Being and Nothing, is not Being and Nothing, but the tendency of each to pass into the other. Their truth, in short, is not in themselves, but in their process,--and that process by which the one passes into the other is 'To become.' Try to get at mere Being and you are left with Nought: of mere Nought you can only say it is. The two abstractions have no truth except in the passage into one another: and this passage or transition is 'To become.' Take reality apart from what it leads on to, and from what it has come from, apart from its end or purpose and from its cause, take it as mere being: then this being in its supposed singleness and self-subsistence is really annihilated: _stat magni nominis umbra_: but it is the name of nothing. True being is always on the way to or from being: to stop is fatal.