220 ON THE EELATION OF THE 



man. Altliongh exterual obstacles, the forces of nature, accident, 

 rivalry of other men, frequently exert a disturbing influence, the endeav- 

 ors of a human mind perseveringly pursuing its object must, in the end, 

 preponderate and triumi^h over planless hinderauces. Under these cir- 

 cumstances it would not be impossible to lay out a priori the course of 

 development of mankind with regard to the above relations, especially 

 when the philosopher has already' considerable empirical material at his 

 command with which he can combine his abstractions. Mcgel was ma- 

 terially aided in his attempts to solve this question by the deep philo- 

 sophical insight into history and science which the i)hilosopliers and 

 poets of the immediately preceding time had gathered, and which he 

 needed only to arrange and combine to produce a system full of astonish- 

 ing discoveries. In this manner he succeeded in gaining the enthusias- 

 tic applause of the majority of the scholars of his time, and in exciting 

 fantastical hopes for the solution of the profoundest mysteries of 

 human life ; the latter all the more because his system was veiled in 

 curiously abstract language, and was, perhaps, really understood and 

 appreciated only by a small number of his admirers. 



The fact that the construction of the principal results of the mental 

 sciences was more or less successful, was, however, no proof of the cor- 

 rectness of the hypothesis of identity from which HcgeVs philosophy pro- 

 ceeded. On the contrary, the facts of nature would have been the 

 means of furnishing decisive proof. It was a matter of course that 

 traces of the activity of the human mind and of its stages of develop- 

 ment must be found in the mental sciences. If nature reflected the re- 

 sult of the thoughts of a similar creative mind, the comparatively sim- 

 l)ler forms and processes of nature could the more easily be arranged 

 into systems. But it was just at this point that the philosophy of iden- 

 tity failed, we may say, completely. The natural philosophy of Hegel, 

 to naturalists at least, appeared absolutely senseless. Among the many 

 excellent naturalists of that time there was not a single one who could 

 accept his ideas. But it was of the greatest importance to IJegel to 

 obtain the same appreciation here that he had found so abundantly in 

 the other sciences. He waged an unnsually passionate and bitter contro- 

 versy, directed especially against Newton, the first and greatest repre- 

 sentative of scientific research. He taxed the naturalists with narrow- 

 mindedness, and they in their turn accused their opponent of absurdi- 

 ties. The naturalists began to lay stress upon the assertion that their 

 labors had been free from all philosophical infiuences, and soon many of 

 them, including even men of great eminence, condemned all pliilosophj", 

 not only as useless, but even as injurious vagaries. We cannot deny 

 that along with the unjust claims of the philosophy of Hegel, to subor- 

 dinate the other sciences, its just claims, to criticise the sources of 

 knowledge and determine a standard for intellectual labors, were thrown 

 overboard. 



In the mental sciences the effect was different, although it finally led 



