The Professor answered with his usual gravity and profundity: "Nothing could be more profound, and as lucid as profound, if Hegel's theory of the 'evolution of the concrete' was remembered. According to that theory the concrete is the idea which, as a unity, is variously determined, having the principle of its activity within itself, while the origin of the activity, the act itself, and the result, are one, and constitute the concrete. The innate contradiction of the concrete is the basis of its development, and though differences arise, they at last vanish into unity. To use the words of Hegel, there is 'both the movement and repose in the movement. The difference hardly appears before it disappears, whereupon there issues from it a full and complete unity.'"
"That is very clear and satisfactory," observed Mr. Stanley, ironically; not seeing anything but confusion confounded in the whole of it. "What is your view," he asked again, "of the Hegelian 'Absolute'?"
"This," said the Professor, "is nothing but a continual process of thinking, without beginning and without end. Now that the evolution of ideas in the human mind is the process of all existence--the essence of the Absolute--of a Deity, so that Deity is nothing more than the Absolute ever striving to realize itself in human consciousness."
Without questioning the truthfulness of such a doctrine, so _plainly expressed_, Mr. Stanley proceeded to ask, in a way rather beyond himself, "Whether there was not a little to be said for Schelling's notion that the rhythmical law of all existence is cognisable at the same time by the internal consciousness of the subjective self, in the objective operation of Nature?"
To this question, somewhat mystical it must be confessed, the Professor replied in his usual style of profundity:--
"I see clearly enough Schelling's great ingenuity; but think his three movements or potencies--that of 'Reflexion,' whereby the Infinite strives to realize itself in the Finite--that of 'Subsumption,' which is the striving of the Absolute to return from the Finite to the Infinite--and that of the 'Indifference-point,' or point of junction of the two first--were not to be admitted; for is it not clear as the day that the poles ever persist in remaining apart, the indifference-point having never been fixed by Schelling?"