which a negative factor was to be recognized as the positive vehicle in
the development of the whole world. And thus his genius came upon a
method which revealed to him an orderly unfolding in the world with
stages of relative values, the higher developing from the lower, and all
stages constituting an organic whole.

The method which the young Hegel discovered empirically, and which the
mature rationalist applied to every sphere of human life and thought, is
the famous Dialectical Method. This method is, in general, nothing else
than the recognition of the necessary presence of a negative factor in
the constitution of the world. Everything in the world--be it a
religious cult or a logical category, a human passion or a scientific
law--is, so Hegel holds, the result of a process which involves the
overcoming of a negative element. Without such an element to overcome,
the world would indeed be an inert and irrational affair. That any
rational and worthy activity entails the encounter of opposition and the
removal of obstacles is an observation commonplace enough. A
preëstablished harmony of foreseen happy issues--a fool's paradise--is
scarcely our ideal of a rational world. Just as a game is not worth
playing when its result is predetermined by the great inferiority of the
opponent, so life without something negative to overcome loses its zest.
But the process of overcoming is not anything contingent; it operates
according to a uniform and universal law. And this law constitutes
Hegel's most central doctrine--his doctrine of Evolution.

In order to bring this doctrine into better relief, it may be well to
contrast it superficially with the Darwinian theory of transformation.
In general, Hegel's doctrine is a concept of value, Darwin's is not.
What Darwinians mean by evolution is not an unfolding of the past, a
progressive development of a hierarchy of phases, in which the later is