year a newspaper editor in Bamberg, and in 1808 went as a gymnasial rector to Nuremberg, where he instructed the higher classes in philosophy. His lectures there are printed in the eighteenth volume of his works, under the title Propedeutic. In the Nuremberg period fell his marriage and the publication of the Logic (vol. i. 1812, vol. ii. 1816). In 1816 he was called as professor of philosophy to Heidelberg (where the Encyclopædia appeared, 1817), and two years later to Berlin. The Outlines of the Philos ophy of Right, 1821, is the only major work which was written in Berlin. The Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik, founded in 1827 as an organ of the school, contained a few critiques, but for the rest he devoted his whole strength to his lectures. He fell a victim to the cholera on November 14, 1831. The collected edition of his works in eighteen volumes (1832-45) contains in vols. ii.-viii. the four major works which had been published by Hegel himself (the Encyclopædia with additions from the Lectures); in vols. i., xvi., and xvii. the minor treatises; in vols. ix.-xv. the Lectures, edited by Gans, Hotho, Marheineke, and Michelet. The Letters from and to Hegel have been added as a nineteenth volume, under the editorship of Karl Hegel, 1887.*

We may preface our exposition of the parts of the system by some remarks on Hegel's standpoint in general and his scientific method.

*Hegel's Life has been written by Karl Rosenkranz (1844), who has also defended the master (Apologie Hegels, 1858) against R. Haym (Hegel und seine Zeit, 1857), and extolled him as the national philosopher of Germany (1870; English by G. S. Hall). Cf., further, the neat popular exposition by Karl Köstlin, 1870, and the essays by Ed. von Hartmann, Ueber die dialektische Methode, 1868, and Hegels Panlogismus (1870, incorporated in the Gesammelte Studien und Aufsätze, 1876). [The English reader may consult E. Caird's Hegel in Blackwood's Philosophical Classics, 1883; Harris's Hegel's Logic, Morris's Hegel's Philosophy of the State and of History, and Kedney's Hegel's Asthetics in Griggs's Philosophical Classics; and Wallace's translation of the "Logic "— from the Encyclopædia-with Prolegomena, 1874, 2d. ed., Translation, 1892, Prolegomena to follow. Stirling's Secret of Hegel, 2 vols., London, 1865, includes a translation of a part of the Logic, and numerous translations from different works of the master are to be found in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. The Lectures on the Philosophy of History have been translated by J. Sibree, M. A., in Bohn's Library, 1860, and E. S. Haldane is issuing a translation of those on the History of Philosophy, vol i., 1892.-TR.]

1. Hegel's View of the World and his Method.

In Hegel there revives in full vigor the intellectualism which from the first had lain in the blood of German philosophy, and which Kant's moralism had only temporarily restrained. The primary of practical reason is discarded, and theory is extolled as the ground, center, and aim of human, nay, of all existence.

Leibnitz and Hegel are the classical representatives of the intellectualistic view of the world. In the former the subjective psychological point of view is dominant, in the latter, the objective cosmical position: Leibnitz argues from the representative nature of the soul to an analogous constitution of all elements of the universe; from the general mission of all that is real, to be a manifestation of reason, Hegel deduces that of the individual spirit, to realize a determinate series of stages of thought. The true reality is reason; all being is the embodiment of a pregnant thought, all becoming a movement of the concept, the world a development of thought. The absolute or the logical Idea exists first as a system of antemundane concepts, then it descends into the unconscious sphere of nature, awakens to self-consciousness in man, realizes its content in social institutions, in order, finally, in art, religion, and science to return to itself enriched and completed, i. e., to attain a higher absoluteness than that of the beginning. Philosophy is the highest product and the goal of the world-process. As will, intuition, representation, and feeling are lower forms of thought, so ethics, art, and religion are preliminary stages in philosophy; for it first succeeds in that which these vainly attempt, in presenting the concept adequately, in conceptual form.

If we develop that which is contained as a constituent factor or by implication in the intellectualistic thesis, "All being is thought realized, all becoming a development of thought," we reach the following definitions: (1) The object of philosophy is formed by the Ideas of things. Its aim is to search out the concept, the purpose, the significance of phenomena, and to assign to these their corresponding positions in the world and in the system of knowl

edge. It is chiefly interested in discovering where in the scale of values a thing belongs according to its meaning and its destination; the procedure is teleological, valuing, æsthetic. Instead of a causal explanation of phenomena we are given an ideal interpretation of them. (So Lotze accurately describes the character of German idealism.) (2) If all that is real is a manifestation of reason and each thing a stage, a modification of thought, then thought and being are identical. (3) If the world is thought in becoming, and philosophy has to set forth this process, philosophy is a theory of development. If each thing realizes a thought, then all that is real is rational; and if the world-process attains its highest stadium in philosophy, and this in turn its completion in the system of absolute idealism, then all that is rational is real. Reason or the Idea is not merely a demand, a longed for ideal, but a world-power which accomplishes its own realization. "The rational is real and the real is rational" (Preface to the Philosophy of Right). Or to sum it up-Hegel's philosophy is idealism, a system of identity, and an optimistic doctrine of development. What, then, distinguishes Hegel from other idealists, philosophers of identity, and teachers of development? What in particular distinguishes him from his predecessor Schelling?

In Schelling nature is the subject and art the conclusion of the development; his idealism has a physical and æsthetical character, as Fichte's an ethical character. In Hegel, however, the concept is the subject and goal of the development, his philosophy is, in the words of Haym, a "Logisierung" of the world, a logical idealism.

The theory of identity is that system which looks upon nature and spirit as one in essence and as phenomenal modes of an absolute which is above them both. But while Schelling treats the real and the ideal as having equal rights, Hegel restores the Fichtean subordination of nature to spirit, without, however, sharing Fichte's contempt for nature. Nature is neither co-ordinate with spirit nor a mere instrument for spirit, but a transition stage in the development of the absolute, viz., the Idea in its otherbeing (Anderssein). It is spirit itself that becomes nature in order to become actual, conscious spirit; before the abso

lute became nature it was already spirit, not, indeed, "for itself" (für sich), yet "in itself" (an sich), it was Idea or reason. The ideal is not merely the morning which follows the night of reality, but also the evening which precedes it. The absolute (the concept) develops from in-itself (Ansich) through out-of-self (Aussersich) or other-being to foritself (Fürsich); it exists first as reason (system of logical concepts), then as nature, finally as living spirit. Thus Hegel's philosophy of identity is distinguished from Schelling's by two factors: it subordinates nature to spirit, and conceives the absolute of the beginning not as the indifference of the real and ideal, but as ideal, as a realm of eternal thoughts.

The assertion that Hegel represents a synthesis of Fichte and Schelling is therefore justified. This is true, further, for the character of Hegel's thought as a whole, in so far as it follows a middle course between the world-estranged, rigid abstractness of Fichte's thinking and Schelling's artisticofanciful intuition, sharing with the former its logical stringency as well as its dominant interest in the philosophy of spirit, and with the latter its wide outlook and its sense for the worth and the richness of that which is individual.

We have characterized Hegel's system, thirdly, as a philosophy of development. The point of distinction here is that Hegel carries out with logical consecutiveness and up to the point of obstinacy the principle of development which Fichte had discovered, and which Schelling also had occasionally employed, the threefold rhythm thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Here we come to Hegel's dialectic method. He reached this as the true method of speculation through a comparison of the two forms of philosophy which he found dominant at the beginning of his career-the Illumination culminating in Kant, on the one hand, and, on the other, the doctrine of identity defended by Schelling and his circle-neither of which entirely satisfied him.

In regard to the main question he feels himself one with Schelling philosophy is to be metaphysics, the science of the absolute and its immanence in the world, the doctrine of the identity of opposites, of the per se of things, not merely

of their phenomenon. But the form which Schelling had given it seems to him unscientific, unsystematic, for Schelling had based philosophical knowledge on the intuition of genius-and science from intuition is impossible. The philosophy of the Illumination impresses him, on the other hand, by the formal strictness of its inquiry; he agrees with it that philosophy must be science from concepts. Only not from abstract concepts. Kant and the Illumination stand on the platform of reflection, for which the antithesis of thought and being, finite and infinite remains insoluble, and, consequently, the absolute transcendent, and the true Jessence of things unknowable. Hegel wishes to combine the advantages of both sides, the depth of content of the one, and the scientific form of the other.

The intuition with which Schelling works is immediate cognition, directed to the concrete and particular. The concept of the philosophy of reflection is mediate cognition, moving in the sphere of the abstract and universal. Is it not feasible to do away with the (unscientific) immediateness of the one, and the (non-intuitive, content-lacking) abstractness of the other, to combine the concrete with the mediate or conceptual, and in this way to realize the Kantian ideal of an intuitive understanding? A concrete concept would be one which sought the universal not without the particular, but in it; which should not find the infinite beyond the finite, nor the absolute at an unattainable distance above the world, nor the essence hidden behind the phenomenon, but manifesting itself therein. If the philosophy of reflection, in the abstract lifelessness of its concepts, looked on opposites as incapable of sublation, and Schelling regarded them as immediately identical, if the former denied the identity of opposites, and the latter maintained it primordially given (in the absolute indifference which is to be grasped by intuition), the concrete concept secures the identity of opposites through self-mediation, their passing over into it; it teaches us to know the identity as the result of a process. First immediate unity, then divergence of opposites, and, finally, reconciliation of opposites-this is the universal law of all development.