476 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



scheme was much more in the nature of a postulate, 

 of a great task which he set before the age and the 

 nation, a programme which had to be worked out by 

 many labourers, by the co-operation of many minds, 

 and after generations of research. It is, however, quite 

 as certain that this programme, which covers really, up 

 to quite recent times, the best work of many minds, 

 not only in Germany, but also in other countries, 

 would not have become intelligible if Hegel himself 

 had not made an attempt to carry it out; the philo- 

 sophical spirit, which culminated in him, would 

 without his efforts, his successes and his failures not 

 have got such a firm hold of the thought of the nine- 

 teenth century, that all attempts to supersede it as, for 

 instance, by the exact or the critical spirit have proved 

 vain. Hegel did not create this philosophical spirit, 

 he only represented it in its most abstract form ; but 

 he proclaimed, formulated, and introduced it into many 

 regions which it has since enlivened. Nor can he 

 justly be blamed for having clothed it in terms which 

 were too abstract, or encased it in formulae which were 

 29. too rigid. As Francis Bacon was held up in the 

 with Bacon, seventeenth century as the herald of a new movement 

 of thought in spite of the errors which abound in his 

 enunciation of its methods, so Hegel deserves to be 

 looked upon as the greatest representative of philo- 

 sophical thought in the nineteenth century ; who has 

 done more and this more effectually for modern 

 philosophical thought than the great Chancellor did 

 for scientific thought. Those who first see the general 

 importance and far-reaching power of a new movement 



