PREFACE.

The "Logic of Hegel" is a name that may be given to two separate books. One of these is the Science of Logic original: Wissenschaft der Logik, first published in three volumes (1812–1816) while its author was a schoolmaster at Nuremberg. A second edition was in progress when Hegel was suddenly cut off by death, having revised only the first volume. In the book The Secret of Hegel, the earlier part of this Logic was translated by Dr. Hutchison Stirling, the man with whom German philosophy is most closely associated in this country.

The other Logic, of which the present work is a translation, forms the First Part of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. The first edition of the Encyclopedia appeared at Heidelberg in 1817; the second in 1827; and the third in 1830. It is helpful to remember that these dates take us back forty or fifty years to a time when modern science and Inductive Logic A system of reasoning where general laws are inferred from particular instances; popularized by thinkers like John Stuart Mill. had yet to earn their reputations, and when the world was in many ways different from how it is now. The earliest edition of the Encyclopedia contained the core of the system. The subsequent...