This characteristic of patient work is seen, for example, in the incessant prosecution of hints and glimpses, until they grew into systematic and rounded outline. Instead of vague anticipations and guesses at truth, fragments of insight, his years of philosophic study are occupied with writing and re-writing, in the _V_ endeavour to clear up and arrange the masses of his ideas. Essay after essay, and sketch after sketch of a system, succeed each other amongst his papers. His first great work was not published before his 37th year, after six years spent in university work at Jena, following as many spent in preliminary lucubration. The notes which he used to dictate some years afterwards to the boys in the Gymnasium at Nürnberg bear evidence of constant remodelling, and the same is true of his professorial lectures. Such insistance in tracing every suggestion of truth to its place in the universe of thought is the peculiar character and difficulty of Hegelian argument. Other observers have now and again noticed, accentuated, and, it may be, popularised some one point or some one law in the evolution of reason. Here and there, as we reflect, we are forced to recognise what Hegel termed the dialectical nature in thought,--the tendency, by which a principle, when made to be all that it implied, when, as the phrase is, it is carried to extremes, recoils and leaves us confronted by its antithesis. We cannot, for example, study the history of ancient thought without noting this phenomenon. Thus, the persistence with which Plato and Aristotle taught and enforced the doctrine that the community was the guide and safeguard of the several citizens, very soon issued in the schools of Zeno and Epicurus, teaching the rights of self-seeking and of the independent self-realisation of the individual. But the passing glimpse of an indwelling discord in the terms, by which we argue, is soon forgotten, and is set aside under the head of accidents, instead of being referred to a general law. Most of us take only a single step to avoid what has turned out wrong, and when we have overcome the seeming absoluteness of one idea, we are content and even eager to throw ourselves under the yoke of another, not less one-sided than its predecessor. Sometimes one feels tempted to say that the course of human thought as a whole, as well as that branch of it termed science, exhibits nothing but a succession of illusions, which enclose us in the belief that some idea is all-embracing as the universe,--illusions, from which the mind is time after time liberated, only in a little while to sink under the sway of some partial correction, as if it and it only were the complete truth.