To ascertain that ultimate basis of the world and mind was the chief thing philosophy had to see to. But in order to do this, a good deal of preliminary work was necessary. The work of Logic, as understood by Hegel, involves a stand-point which is not that of every-day life or reflection on experience. It presupposes the whole process from the provisional starting-point which seems at first sight simplest and universally acceptable, upwards to the unhypothetical principle which--though at a long distance--it involves and leads up to, or presupposes. We all know Aristotle's dictum ᾽Εν τοῐς αὶσθητοῐς τὰ νοητά ἐστιν: _Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu._ The fact of sense and feeling _is_ the fact of experience: or rather the fact and reality of experience is the underlying truth which the expression of it in terms of sense and perception inadequately interprets. Even in the principles of sensation there is judgment, thought, reasoning: but it needs eliciting, re-statement, opening up, and explanation. The Phenomenology of Mind is, as Hegel himself has said, his voyage of discovery. It traces the path, and justifies the work of traversing it, from the ill-founded and imperfect certainties of sense and common-sense, up through various scientific, moral, and religious modes of interpreting experience and expressing its net sum of reality, till it culminates in the stand-point of 'pure thought,' of supreme or 'absolute' consciousness. It is certainly not a history of the individual mind: and equally little is it a history of the process of the intellectual development of the race. In a way it mixes up both. For its main interest is not on the purely historical side. It indulges in bold transitions, in sudden changes of scene from ancient Greece and Rome to modern Germany, from public facts and phases of national life to works of fiction (compare its use of Goethe's _Faust_ and his version of _Rameau's Nephew)._ It lingers--for historical accuracy and proportion unduly--over the period of Kant and Fichte, and reads Seneca by the light of the _Sorrows of Werther._ For its aim is to gather from the inspection of all ways in which men have attempted to reach reality the indication of their several content of truth, and of the several defects from it, so as to show the one necessary path on which even all their errors converge and which they serve to set out in clearer light.