HKB
in face of the working out of the universal problem, for, here, cause and effect exchange places, what was at one time and place effect becoming cause and vice versa.
All these phenomena and thought-concepts do not fit into the frame of metaphysical philosophy. According to the dialectic method of thinking which regards things and their concepts in relation to their connection with each other, their concatenation, their coming into being and passing away, phenomena, like the preceding, are so many confirmations of its own philosophy. Nature is the proof of the dialectic, and we must give to modern science the credit of having furnished an extraordinary wealth and daily increasing store of material towards this proof, and thereby showing in the last instance things proceed dialectically and not in accordance with metaphysical notions. But as the scientists who have learned to think dialectically may be still easily counted, the chaos arising from the confusion between actual results and an antiquated mode of thought is thus explained, and this confusion is to-day dominant in theoretical science, and drives teachers and pupils, writers and readers to despair.
A correct notion of the universe, of the human race, as well as of the reflection of this progress in the human mind can only be had by means of the dialectic method, together with a steady observation of the change and interchange which goes on in the universe, the coming into existence and passing away, progressive and retrogressive modification.
And the later German philosophy has proceeded from this standpoint. Kant began his career in this way by abolishing Newton's conception of a stable solar system which persisted after receiving its first impulse, in favor of a historical process, to wit, the origin of the sun and all the planets from a rotating mass of nebulae. From this concept he drew the conclusion that, granted this origin, the future dissolution of the solar system is inevitable. His theory was mathematically proved by Laplace half a century later, and half a century later still the spectroscope discovered the existence of such glowing masses of gas in space in different stages of condensation.
This later German philosophy found its conclusion in the philosophy of Hegel where for the first time, and this is his greatest service, the entire natural, historical and spiritual universe was regarded as a process, that is, as in constant progress, change, transformation and development, and the attempt was made to show the more subtle relations of this process and development. From this historical point of view the history of mankind no longer appeared as a barren confusion of mindless forces, all alike subject to rejection before the judgment seat of the most recently ripened philosophy, and which, at the very best, man puts out of his mind as soon as possible, but as the development-process of humanity itself, to follow the process of which, little by little, through all its ramifications, and to establish the essential laws of which, in spite of all apparent accidents, is now the task of philosophic thought.