Caelile. — On the Ultimate Problem of PJiilosophy . 75 



son, of Canada ; and many others. So much so that, if any 

 system of philosophy can be said to be dominant in England 

 at present, it is the system of Hegel. Hegelianisra, however, 

 is with us a general name for the philosophy which at the 

 beginning of the century sprang up in Germany, contem- 

 poraneously with the development of the poetic spirit that 

 gave birth to Goethe and Schiller — and was, indeed, another 

 aspect of the same movement ^rather than for the special 

 characters which distinguish the philosophy of Hegel from 

 that of his contemporaries Schellmg and Fichte. It has been 

 remarked, indeed, with some truth, that Hegelianism, having 

 lost its birthright in German)'-, is sojourning now in the tents 

 of England and America. What is true and valuable in 

 Hegelianism, however, still survives in Germany in the sys- 

 tems of other thinkers, even of one so widely removed from his 

 special standpoint as Lotze, and yet more notably in the sys- 

 tem of Von Hartmau. 



It is not now my intention to-night to attempt to add to 

 the number of his expositors, or to deal with any of the 

 details of his system. What it seems to me is the imperish- 

 able truth it contains lies in its emphatic repudiation of the 

 right of Kant or any one else to set bounds in advance to the 

 subjects of human inquiry, and the confident assertion of the 

 adequacy of the grounds that we possess for the belief that 

 behind the developments of nature and history are visible the 

 operations of a guiding intelligence, of which our own is the 

 offshoot and the image. 



For those who incline to the opinion that mind can be 

 adequately accounted for as something that exists in the 

 universe only as a product of cerebral organization, a class 

 of phenomena which manifest themselves as the result of the 

 operations of the collective and continuous thought of a race 

 or a community are worthy of due consideration. Take such 

 a phenomenon as the British Constitution : We have in it a 

 well-defined, fully-organized system, capable of being adopted 

 by other States besides the State which originally developed 

 it, and, in essential matters, by no means easy to improve 

 upon. The founders of the American Eepublic, sharing the 

 fancy prevalent in those days that innovation could not be 

 other than improvement, thought that they could alter it 

 easily for the better by separating the legislative from the 

 executive functions. How profound w^as their mistake has 

 been very conclusively made out by Mr. Bagehot. We find 

 according to that writer that European States which have 

 since had to adopt Constitutions have adhered much more 

 closely to the English model than the American Conventioii 

 did. If we ask, however, to what English lawgiver, states- 

 man, or philosopher the salient characteristics of the English 



