Apart from one or two of the greatest minds, notably Dante, what appealed to the thinkers of the middle ages was not the idea of reality as a progressive self-revelation of an inner principle working through nature and human life, but the formal principles of classification which it seemed to offer for a material of thought and action given from another source.
He had none of Pepys's love of gossip, and was devoid of his all-embracing curiosity, as of his diverting frankness of self-revelation.
Hegel's logic as a whole, however, stands and falls not with his thoughts on syllogism, but with the claim made for the dialectical method that it exhibits logic in its integral unity with metaphysic, the thought-process as the self-revelation of the Idea.
And thus in Philo's conception the Logos is much more than "the principle of reason, informing the infinite variety of things, and so creating the World-Order"; it is also the divine dynamic, the energy and self-revelation of God.
