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HEFELE 



HEGEL 



church, referred only to doctrine given forth ex 

 cathedrd, and therein to the definitions proper only, 

 but not to its proofs or applications. Of Hefele's 

 writings may be named an edition of the Apostolic 

 Fathers ( 1839 ; 4th ed. 1855); Chrysostomus-Postille, 

 a translation (1845; 3d ed. 1857); Die Einfiihrung 

 des Christentums im siidwestlichen Deutschland 

 (1837); Der Kardinal Ximenes und die kirchlichen 

 Zustdnde Spaniens im ISten Jahrhundert ( 1844 ; 

 2d ed. 1851; Eng. trans, by Canon Dalton, 1860); 

 Beitrdge zur Kirchengeschichte, Archdologie mid 

 Liturgik (i 864-65); and especially his magistral 

 Konziliengeschichte (1 vols. 1855-74; 2d ed. 1873 et 

 seq, ) of which an English translation, coming 

 down to the Council of Nicaea (325), was published 

 in 1871. Died June 5, 1893. 



Hegel, GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH, was the 

 last in a succession of four great writers, who 

 during the later part of the 18th and the first 

 quarter of the 19th century developed the idealistic 

 philosophy of Germany ; the other three being 

 Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. He was born at 

 Stuttgart on the 27th August 1770, and educated 

 at the university of Tubingen, where he formed an 

 intimate friendship with Schelling, his philosophi- 

 cal predecessor. Schelling was five years younger 

 than Hegel, bnt very precocious. His rapid 

 intuitive genius urged him to express his thoughts 

 almost before they were ripe for expression, and he 

 had begun to publish important contributions to 

 philosophy even before his student-life had come to 

 an end. Hegel, on the other hand, was slow in 

 his intellectual development, and from a desire for 

 systematic completeness and consistency he was 

 unwilling to utter his thoughts till he had made all 

 their relations clear to himself. Consequently he 

 passed through the university without any special 

 distinction, and it was not till six years after he 

 left it years during which he maintained himself 

 by acting as a private tutor that he began to seek 

 academic work and to bring his views upon philo- 

 sophical questions before the public. 



In 1801, however, he entered upon his scholastic 

 career at the university of Jena, publishing at 

 the same time an essay on the difference be- 

 tween the philosophies of Fichte and Schelling, 

 in which he on the whole placed himself on the 

 side of the latter, though not without indicating 

 some divergences of view. From 1801 to 1806 

 he continued to teach in the university of Jena, 

 first as a privat-docent (or licensed lecturer), and 

 then as a professor extra-ordinary, and in the early 

 part of that period he joined with Schelling 

 in writing a philosophical periodical called the 

 Critical Journal of Philosophy. At this time the 

 two philosophers were so closely identified in their 

 views that there has been considerable dispute as 

 to the authorship of some of the articles. In one 

 of Hegel's latest contributions, however, the 

 reasons for his subsequent separation from Schel- 

 ling are clearly indicated. It was riot till 1807 

 that Hegel published the Phenomenology of the 

 Spirit, the first work in which he fully exhibited 

 the depth and independence of his philosophic 

 genius. By this time, mainly in consequence of 

 Napoleon's victory over the Prussians, the uni- 

 versity of Jena was for a time broken up, and 

 Hegel was forced to find employment as the editor 

 of a newspaper at Bamberg. In the following year 

 he was appointed director of the gymnasium or 

 public school of Nuremberg, where he remained 

 during the next nine years. In 1811 he married, 

 and in the following year he published the first 

 volume of his greatest work, the Logic, a treatise 

 which treats of what is ordinarily called Logic in 

 connection with Metaphysic. It was not till 1816 

 that his growing fame as a writer secured his 

 nomination to a professorship in Heidelberg ; this, 



two years after, he exchanged for the chair of 

 Philosophy at Berlin formerly occupied by Fichte. 

 There he continued to teach till the 14th November 

 1831, when he was carried off by a sudden attack of 

 cholera. During these years he published several 

 works, of which the most important is the Philo- 

 sophy of Right, and contributed several articles to 

 the Philosophical Year-book, a journal which was 

 mainly, though not exclusively, the organ of his 

 disciples. His influence during this period was so 

 great that he might also be said to have been the 

 philosophical dictator of Germany. At his death a 

 number of his friends combined to prepare a com- 

 plete edition of his works, in which they included 

 not only the books he had published during his 

 lifetime, but also reports of courses of lectures 

 delivered by him upon many departments of philo- 

 sophy. Among these may be mentioned specially 

 his lectures upon the Philosophy of Religion, the 

 Philosophy of Art, the History of Philosophy, and 

 the Philosophy of History. 



It is impossible within our limits to characterise 

 adequately the work of such an encyclopaedic mind 

 as Hegel's, but it is possible in a few words to 

 indicate the main tendencies of his philosophy. In 

 the first place, Hegel was an Idealist. By this it is 

 meant, however, not that he reduced the facts of 

 the outward world to ideas, or held that there 

 are no facts but the ideas of the individual mind. 

 It is meant only that he held that we must 

 ultimately explain the world as the manifestation 

 of a rational piinciple. Kant had shown that all 

 known or knowable objects are relative to a 

 conscious subject, and that therefore we cannot 

 legitimately treat them as things in themselves 

 i.e. as things that might exist by themselves even 

 if there were no intelligent principle in existence to 

 know them. He had shown, in other words, that 

 existence means nothing unless it means existence 

 for a self. Hegel carried the argument a step 

 further, and maintained that the world of objects 

 is not only related to an intelligence, but that it 

 can be nothing but the revelation or manifestation 

 of intelligence. In this way he sought not only 

 with Kant to show the impossibility of a material- 

 istic explanation of things, but to prove the 

 necessity of an idealistic explanation of them. He 

 did not therefore deny the reality of the material 

 world, but maintained it to be an imperfect or 

 incomplete reality which could not exist by itself 

 without something else to supplement it! He 

 attempted to prove that matter is the necessary 

 object and counterpart of spirit, in which spirit 

 reveals, and through which it realises, itself ; and 

 that indeed the material world only shows its 

 ultimate meaning, when we regard it as the 

 natural environment and basis for the life of 

 spiritual beings. 



In the second place, Hegel connected this idealistic 

 or spiritualistic view of things with the great 

 modern idea of Evolution or Development. That idea 

 is often supposed to involve that the highest and 

 most complex existences may be traced back to the 

 lowest and simplest that, for example, we may 

 hope ultimately to explain the phenomena of life 

 by mechanics and chemistry, and the phenomena of 

 thought and will by the powers of nutrition and 

 sensation which are manifested in the lowest 

 forms of animal life. And in a similar way the 

 idea of evolution is supposed to imply that we can 

 explain the highest forms of religion as nothing 

 more than refined reproductions of the crude 

 superstitions of savages. Hegel, on the other 

 hand, maintains that, as it is the developed form 

 that first tells us what was in the germ, as it is 

 only the life of the man that shows what was latent 

 in the child, so under the idea of evolution we must 

 take the man as explaining the animal, and the 



