Nor is this all. The traveller, as his train climbs the heights of Alps or Apennines, occasionally, after circling in grand curve upon the mountain-side, and perhaps after having been dragged mysterious distances through the gloom of a tunnel, finds himself as it would seem back at the same place as he looked forth from some minutes before; and it is only after a brief comparison that he realises he now commands a wider view from a point some hundreds of feet higher. So the student of Hegel--(and it might be the case with Fichte also) as the machinery of the dialectical method, with its thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, carries him round and round from term to term of thought--like the _Logos_ and the Spirit, which blow us whithersoever they list--begins to suffer from dizziness at the apprehension that he has been the victim of phantasmagoria and has not really moved at all. It is only later--if ever--that he recognises that the scene, though similar, is yet not altogether the same. It is only later--if ever--that he understands that the path of philosophy is no wandering from land to land more remote in search of a lost Absolute, a vanished God; no setting forth of new and strange facts, of new Gods, but the revelation in fuller and fuller truth of the immanent reality in whom we live, and move, and have our being,--the manifestation in more closely-knit unity and more amply-detailed significance of that Infinite and Eternal, which was always present among us, though we saw but few, perhaps even no, traces of its power and glory.
To read Hegel often reminds us of the process we have to go through in trying to answer a riddle. The terms of the problem to be solved are all given to us: the features of the object are, it may be, fully described: and yet somehow we cannot at once tell what it is all about, or add up the sum of which we have the several items. We are waiting to learn the subject of the proposition, of which all these statements may be regarded as the predicates. Something, we feel, has undoubtedly been said: but we are at a loss to see what it has been said about. Our mind wanders round from one familiar object to another, and tries them in succession to see whether any one satisfies the several points in the statement and includes them all. We grope here and there for something we are acquainted with, in which the bits of the description may cohere, and get a unity which they cannot give themselves. When once we have hit upon the right object, our troubles are at an end: and the empty medium is now peopled with a creature of our imagination. We have reached a fixed point in the range of our conception, around which the given features may cluster.