48 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



What that age demanded was more than a poetical 

 and artistic expression of the truth which it believed to 

 be within its reach ; it was a strictly logical, or, as it 

 was called, scientific treatment and exposition. This was 

 required in the interests of academic teaching, and also 

 in opposition to the arbitrariness and the vagaries of the 

 romantic school. 1 The suggestiveness of Schelling's writ- 

 ings, lectures, and addresses was widely recognised, but 

 also the want of a definite method through which his 

 ideas could be more closely defined, developed, and 

 si. applied. This method was supplied by Hegel. The 



This sup- 

 plied by vague idea of development which governed the specula- 

 tions of Schelling but which with him, as also with 

 Goethe, did not really get beyond the search for distinct 

 types, or what Schelling called powers or stages was to 

 be more clearly set out. This was to be done by a new 

 logic which not only should study the formal side of the 

 thinking process but should take in real earnest the sug- 

 gestion that thought was in some form or other at the 

 root of everything, and that the conscious process of 

 thinking, known to us by introspection, was symbolical 

 of the life and unfolding of the world-spirit. To show 

 this in the abstract was the task of Hegel's Logic. Hegel 

 had already, in the ' Phenomenology of the Mind,' clearly 

 defined the position which he took up as distinguished 

 from Schelling; he there breaks with the idea of an 

 aesthetical or intellectual intuition. He desires that 

 this should be replaced by clear and transparent thought, 

 that Sight should be replaced by Knowledge. The 

 Absolute or ground of everything does not live in polar 

 contrasts, or identity of opposites ; it is a definite idea 



