196 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



40. twisted into a form convenient in the eyes of the leaders 



Used in the 



interest of of reaction, and how. under the guise of the culture of 



conservative 



reaction. ^he intellect, an intellectual tyranny with all the ac- 

 companying evils of bureaucracy, officialism, and later 

 on of militarism, could find a sort of philosophical 

 support and speculative sanction. It would be unjust 

 to accuse Hegel himself of using the watchwords and 

 formulae of his philosophy in this unphilosophical sense, 

 but it cannot be denied that his teaching, precisely 

 because it seemed to do this, found favour with some of 

 the leaders of the reactionary movement in Berlin, and 

 that in the same degree it was looked upon with dis- 

 favour by many youthful and ardent minds who were 

 moved by ideals of political and religious liberty and of 

 the intellectual enfranchisement of the human mind 

 from religious and political bondage. 



41. Some of the latter were then not slow to discover 

 turned in that the formulae of the Hegelian philosophy could just 



the opposite 



direction, as easily be used in an opposite direction, that instead 

 of leading to conservatism in Church and State, sup- 

 porting orthodoxy in religion and absolutism in politics, 

 they could readily be employed to support religious and 

 political radicalism. This conviction forced itself gradu- 

 ally upon many who really started as orthodox believers, 

 but had imbibed, through the study of philosophy, that 

 very tendency which, as I have shown, constitutes the 

 abiding feature in all German philosophical thought 

 during the last century, the spirit of criticism and 

 free inquiry. 



Hegel himself, though not a critic in the narrower 

 sense of the word, and impatient of the detailed verifica- 



