Obviously Hegel is a Romantic. That something new. Not so, says Hegel. It cannot tolerate contradictions. I.e., this is how most of us think.
Reason is embodied in the dialectic.
For Socrates, the dialectic was a method of discovering truth through questioning and debate For Kant, dialectic expressed reason's capacity to reach contradictory conclusions from apparently sound premises. For Hegel, dialectic drove the necessary unfolding and development of concepts in history. Synthesis grasps the truth of the whole process. Remember too that reality is thought and thought is reality. This means too that the history of the world is really and only the history of thought, intellectual history or the history of philosophy is the actual history of the world.