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(v) reasoning in his ontological polemics with the sophists of his time, putting them between the horns of two definite alternatives. But in modern philosophy of the West, it was Kant who revived it in his exposing the contradictions involved in the fundamental assumptions of dogmatic philosophy and in the popular conceptions of Soul, World and God. But it was left to Hegel to give a new meaning to dialectic and to interpret it in a new light altogether. For with Hegel, Being contains within itself oppositions and contradictions. Every thought, every reality is but a mixture of Being and non-Being. Dialectic with Hegel, therefore, is equivalent to Self-devolopment or unfoldment, and the world-process itself is a process of dialectic, of antithisis and synthesis, making differences serve as means to higher unities. The legitimate out-come of working out the Hegelian interpretation of the world-process as shown in his dialectic, is the pronouncement of the eternity of the world-process. And with it the soul is also declared to be in the never-ending process of higher and higher evolution without any ultimate rest or quiscent anywhere.
