p After the forcible removal of Chernyshevsky from the literary scene,^^286^^ a disregard for German “metaphysics” began to spread in our advanced circles, where Hegel came to be regarded as predominantly a conservative, if not reactionary thinker. This was a grave error. It is indisputable that towards the end of his life, Hegel was very far from being what he had been earlier. As young men, he and Schelling had planted a tree of liberty in a meadow near Tubingen, and he had filled pages of his album with exclamations such as "Vive la liberte”, "Vive Jean-Jacques!"_r etc. And in the sunset of his day, as he worked on his Philosophic des Rechts, he was indeed ready to preach philosophical " reconciliation with reality" (Belinsky well understood Hegel as he was then). But the chief distinguishing feature of the Hegelian system is by no means that in his old age its creator drew conservative practical conclusions from his theoretical premises. That system occupies one of the first places—if not the very first—in the history of philosophical thought, not because it came to any specially valuable practical conclusions, but because it established certain theoretical principles of such outstanding importance that they must be mastered, not only by the thinker who wishes to work out for himself a correct theoretical conception of the world, but also by every practical worker consciously striving to reconstruct the social order around him. Hegel himself used to say that in philosophy the important thing is method and not results, that is to say, not some particular conclusions or others. So it is from the point of view of method that we should look first of all at his philosophy.

p We know that Hegel called his method dialectical; why did he do so?

p In his Phanomenologie des Geistes he compares human life with dialogue, in the sense that under the pressure of experience our views gradually change, as happens to the opinions of disputants participating in a discussion of a profound intellectual nature. Comparing the course of development of consciousness with the progress of such a discussion, Hegel designated it by the word dialectics, or dialectical motion. This word had already been used by Plato, but it was Hegel who gave it its especially profound and important meaning. To Hegel, dialectics is the soul of all scientific knowledge. It is of extraordinary importance to comprehend its nature. It is the principle of all motion, of all life, of all that occurs in reality. According to Hegel, the finite is not only limited from without, but by virtue of its own nature it negates itself and passes into its own opposite. All that exists can be taken as an example to explain the nature of dialectics. 602 Everything is fluid, everything changes, everything passes away. Hegel compares the power of dialectics with divine omnipotence. Dialectics is that universal irresistible force which nothing can withstand. At the same time dialectics makes itself felt in each separate phenomenon of each separate sphere of life. Take motion. At a given moment, a body in motion is at a given point, but at the very same moment it is also beyond that point too, since if it remained only at the given point it would be motionless. All motion is a living contradiction; all motion is a dialectical process. But the whole life of nature is motion; so that in the study of nature it is absolutely essential to adopt the dialectical viewpoint. Hegel sharply condemns those naturalists who forget this.  [602•*  But the main reproach he addresses to them is that in their classifications they put a wide and impassable gulf between things which in fact pass into one another in obedience to the irresistible force of the law of dialectical motion. The subsequent triumph of transformism in biology clearly demonstrated that this reproach had a quite sound theoretical basis. Exactly the same is being demonstrated by the remarkable discoveries in chemistry which are proceeding before our very eyes. However, there is no doubt that the philosophy of nature is the weakest part of Hegel’s system. He is incomparably stronger in his “logic”, in the " philosophy of history”, and in the philosophy of social life in general, as well as in the "philosophy of mind”. It was here especially that his influence upon the development of social thought in the nineteenth century was most fruitful.

p The following, however, should be noted. Hegel’s viewpoint was that of development. But development may be understood variously. Even now there are naturalists who reiterate with an air of importance: "Nature does not make leaps.” Sociologists, too, frequently say: "Social development is accomplished through slow, gradual changes.” Hegel, on the contrary, affirmed that just as in nature so also in history, leaps are inevitable. "The changes of Being,” he says, "are in general not only a transition of one quantity into another, but also a transition from the qualitative into the quantitative, and conversely; a process of becoming other which breaks off graduality (ein Abbrechen des Allmahlichen) and is qualitatively other as against the preceding determinate being. Water on being cooled does not little by little become solid ... but is suddenly solid; when it has already attained freezing point it may (if it stands still) be wholly liquid, and a slight shake brings it into the state of solidity.” Development becomes comprehensible only when we regard gradual changes as a process through which a leap (or leaps) is prepared and evoked. Whoever 603 wishes to explain the origin of a given phenomenon by slow changes alone is in fact unconsciously assuming that it is already actually there and is imperceptible only on account of its smallness. Such a supposed explanation substitutes for the concept of origin the concept of growth, of a simple change in magnitude, that is to say, it arbitrarily eliminates precisely that which required explanation.  [603•*  We know that modern biology fully recognises the importance of "breaks of graduality in the process of development of animal and vegetable species".

Hegel was an absolute idealist. He taught that the motive force of world development is, in the final analysis, the power of the absolute idea. That, of course, is quite an arbitrary and, one might say, fantastic assumption. Trendelenburg had no difficulty later in demonstrating in his Logische Dntersuchungen that reference to the idea in reality has never explained anything. However, as I remarked in another place, Trendelenburg, in aiming his blows against dialectics, actually hit only its idealist basis.  [603•**  Trendelenburg was quite right when he blamed HegeVs dialectics for " asserting the spontaneous motion of pure thought constituting at the same time the self-generation of being”. But in this assertion lies not the nature of all dialectics in general, but the shortcoming of idealist dialectics. This shortcoming was eliminated by the materialist Marx, so that Trendelenburg’s objection to dialectics has now lost all importance. But Marx himself, before he became a materialist, was a follower of Hegel.