In agreement with the Vedanta, Hegel considers the Absolute to be the truth of all things. All things have their being in the Absolute. There is only one Consciousness everywhere, the self-accomplished Absolute, which, however, when it is equated with Ultimate Reality, cannot fit in with Hegel’s view that the Absolute has to undergo dialectical process in order to complete itself in the Self-consciousness of Spirit. The opinion that a reader of Hegel is likely to form in his mind is that his Absolute is not yet ready and that it has to be manufactured in the future by the evolutionary process of the dialectic of Reason. But Hegel does not permit one to form this opinion consistently, for he asserts that the Absolute is implicit in all the stages of the process and that it is the sole eternal Reality. This, again, would make one feel that his Absolute is an immutable being, not subject to change. Can we then say that the dialectical process is the passage of the relative individual reason functioning in an organic relation to the phenomenal universe towards a gradual unfoldment within itself of the transcendent Absolute which is eternally present in the deepest recesses of its consciousness? May evolution be discoverable only in the Cosmic Reason and not in its essence which is the Absolute? Then cosmic evolution would be possible and necessary, and yet it would not affect the Absolute. But Hegel does not give us the freedom to understand him in this way; he insists that Reality is a becoming, that it is a logical process of dynamic developing evolution. We thus notice two contradictory views which are held by Hegel: on one side he says that there is change and development, evolution or becoming in the Reality. This is clearly an unwarranted transference of relative phenomena experienced by the individual reason to the trans-empirical Absolute. On the other side, he asks us not to forget that his Reason is not any individual state, not the differentiated ideas of the human being, but that it is a universal rational necessity implied in all thoughts, which is transcendental, metaphysical and which has to be realised in Self-consciousness. Here Hegel confuses between the functions of the individual reason moving in adaptation to the evolutionary phenomena of Nature and the Absolute Consciousness which is the true goal of his philosophy.

There are, however, certain features in Hegel’s philosophy which are suggestive of great meaning and for which he deserves the credit that is due to a great philosopher. One of such features is his logical development of the Absolute Idea and carrying it through Nature, to consummate it in the Absolute Spirit, though he did not work out this theory perfectly. His dialectic continues till the Absolute Idea realises itself in the Absolute Spirit. It is possible for us to do proper justice to Hegel by confining his dynamic change, development or evolution to the Absolute Idea and Nature, to the universal subject and the universal object, until they reach their perfection in the Absolute Spirit, without attributing evolutionary development to this Spirit itself, provided we bring about a radical change and rectification in Hegel’s notion of the Spirit. For Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, though it is said to be the self-fulfilment of the Absolute Idea through Nature, is made to seek its perfect expression in art, religion and philosophy. One would have expected Hegel to take the Idea through Nature and raise it to the Transcendent Self-consciousness in the Spirit, in the manner in which the Isvara of the Advaita is raised to the Consciousness of Brahman. But Hegel appears to bring down the Absolute to the relative realm of the individuals when he makes it realise itself in art, religion and philosophy, so that there is the dialectic even in the pure Spirit. This would obviously be a travestied completion of his great philosophy. The Absolute Idea, again, should be carefully freed from individual psychological functions or the logical categories of human thought, and made the cosmic Reason of the Isvara of the Vedanta. If we bring about this change in our concept, and forget Hegel’s own description of the Absolute Spirit, and understand this Spirit in the sense of the Brahman of the Vedanta, we would be able to discover the Isvara of the Vedanta in his Absolute Idea and the body of Isvara in his Nature. The Absolute Spirit would then be Brahman. Hegel’s contention that God is no God without the universe, that God cannot cease to be manifesting himself as the universe, and that he cannot be without recognising himself in the universe which is his universal object and yet non-different from him can be meaningful only when this God is understood in the sense of Isvara, who, too, is no Isvara without the universe, who cannot ever cease from appearing as the universe, and who cannot be without recognising himself in the universe which is his universal object and which is non-different from him. Change and evolution are to be seen in Isvara and in his cosmic body, which two are organically related to each other and which are the prototype of all the continuously evolving individuals here. As the embodiment of all individuals Isvara has plurality in him, though these plural elements are inseparable parts of the organism of his body. So have change and evolution to be characteristics of Hegel’s Absolute Reason as the Idea, which has Nature as its universal body, the two being organically related to each other, and which, as the embodiment of all the relative moments in the dialectical process, is constituted of a plurality of such moments, which are bound to it organically by internal relations. Both for Isvara and the Absolute Idea of Hegel the universal body is not outside as a material existence but is one with knowledge or Reason. All that Hegel has said in regard to the Absolute Idea would then apply to Isvara and His Nature as the body of the Idea would correspond to the Jagat which is the body of Isvara. Nature and history become the stages of the evolution of the Idea into Self-consciousness in the Spirit. But we have to keep the Absolute Spirit apart, unaffected by change, as we do Brahman. This, however, is only a suggestion, and it should not be forgotten that Hegel does not deal with his system in this way.

Another interesting feature in the philosophy of Hegel is his development of the theory of internal relations. The parts of the Absolute are all internally related to it, and this relation they bear even among themselves. God is a logical system of relations. The whole and the part are related to each other organically. A part is what it is because of its unique relation to the whole, and without this relation the part is nothing; it can have neither meaning nor being. Every part is sustained by every other part in a manner that Whitehead is to describe in his theory of organism. Every part is dependent on every other part, and determines it. The whole always exceeds the mathematical sum of its parts; the infinite is not merely an aggregate of finites. The parts are not externally related in a way that one does not determine the other, but are internally related so that any change in any part will affect the whole. The whole ceases to be what it is now when there is modification of condition in any part. Every change is a universal change; there is no such thing as change in a particular part alone. Every situation anywhere mirrors a universal situation. The nature and purpose of the whole is the sole factor that determines what a part is at any given moment. The whole is prior to the parts and is the reality of the parts. The Absolute is such a whole and the individuals in the universe are such parts of it, bearing such relations to it. A complete knowledge of any part involves a knowledge of the whole, for the true essence of the part is in the whole. So it is impossible to have a real knowledge of anything in the universe without a knowledge of the Absolute. The theory of internal relations applies to Isvara, but not to Brahman. And Hegel ought to confine all relations to the Absolute that is conceived in relation to the phenomenal universe, and not to the Absolute as such in its pure essence. The Vedanta holds that attainment of perfect knowledge is impossible as long as one is bound to the empirical universe, and says that ‘by knowing That, all things become known’, in an instantaneous, indivisible, eternal Now and an infinite Here.

Hegel’s Absolute becomes a relative conceptual process and not an immutable consciousness, because the latter is realised only in non-mediate intuition which, for Hegel, is not the genuine way of knowing. He holds that Reality cannot be known in any mystic intuition, but is known only in thought,—Reason. He thinks that Reality cannot be pure being and that any attempt for such an intuition of it would not give us anything more than this abstract being. We find in philosophers like Sankara and Swami Sivananda an insistence that the findings of the intellect have to be judged by the revelations of intuition, but Hegel would have it that the claims of any intuition should be made concrete and real by logical thought. Hegel dissects experience into abstract intuition and concrete reasoning and thinks that intuition is something cut off from the rational process. The result is that he produces a system of philosophy in which Reality becomes a changing process, thus denying its own existence as Reality.

Intuition is a faculty of knowing which is not infra-intellectual but super-intellectual. It is the integral realisation of the true essence of things. The knower enters the very spirit or being of the knowable object and knows it in his own being and consciousness in an instantaneous wholeness which the intellect cannot understand. Intellect is transfigured and raised in intuition, not negated or abandoned. Hegel’s extreme views on the value of rationality are due to an incapacity in him to comprehend the nature of a super-rational means of knowing. Hegel’s own theory that the whole is prior to the parts and that it determines the parts gets defeated by his inductive system of the dialectical process which constructs a general Absolute from the particular phases observed in life through the phenomenal reason. Intuition gives us the whole at once, as prior to the appearance of the particulars, while intellect, which is the tool of Hegel, splits up Reality into parts and infers the former from the latter. Induction can give us only probabilities and not self-evident truths. How, then, did Hegel become confident of the existence of a trans-empirical Absolute which is unattainable by induction and which logically precedes the various knowable particulars in the world? It is impossible to get an Idea of the Absolute by dovetailing particulars through conceptual reasoning. The fact is that Hegel has already in his mind an Idea of the Absolute even prior to his commencing the exposition of the dialectical process which is only a later instrument employed to justify the Idea which was in him intuitively. Nothing but a mystical moment experienced could have been responsible for the rise of an Idea of the Absolute in Hegel’s mind. But this Idea was afterwards clouded by an exaggerated importance given to conceptual thought, and so what Hegel discovered is not the eternal Reality of intuition but a phenomenal appearance of it which makes it inseparable from what we observe in Nature through our imperfect means of the conceptual categories. True philosophy is a rational declaration of intuitional experience, and not a conceptual grouping of externally observed phenomena. Intuition is the immediate knowing by the total being of the Self, while intellect is only an understanding of a few empirical parts. Hegel would have become one of the greatest expounders of the Vedanta, if only he could recognise the significance of intuition, whereby we know the Absolute as it is, and not as it merely appears to us.