Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), the greatest of the German idealists, was deeply influenced by Kant. But he dropped Kant's notion of the noumenal world and concluded that the only real world is phenomenal and therefore produced and structured completely by mind-or what Hegel called Absolute Mind (God). To Hegel, the thought of the Absolute Mind is the universe thinking (by means of the human mind) about itself; and so world history is the progress of the Absolute Mind toward selfawareness and freedom. The mind (or Mind) proceeds by means of a dialectical process in which an idea calls forth its opposite and both are reconciled in a third idea, which calls forth its opposite, and so on. Since the world is the product of mind, this process also operates in history. Hegel's dialectic was the source of the dialectical aspect of Marx's dialectical materialism.

We have here modes of consciousness each of which in realizing itself abolishes itself, has its own negation as its result,-and thus passes over into a higher mode ... . It is in this Dialectic (as here understood) and in the comprehension of the Unity of Opposites, or of the Positive in the negative, that Speculative knowledge consists.
- G.W.F. Hegel, The Science of Logic (1812. A.V. Miller translation, 1969)