480 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



number of scholars who, during the greater part of the 

 century, discovered, collected and arranged an enormous 

 mass of historical detail which furnishes, in almost 

 every department, the greater proportion of the material 

 which is at the disposal of the historians of our day : 

 and Hegel himself was, with the exception of Friedrich 

 Schlegel, the only thinker who ventured upon the task of 

 composing a philosophy of history. Into his treatment 

 of this subject he introduced two prominent ideas, both 

 of which are capable of very various interpretations, but 

 which have through all these retained a permanent hold 

 of the philosophical mind so far as it is interested in the 

 study of history. These are, first, the conception of the 

 whole progress of development in history as an enlarging 

 of the notion of freedom from the notion that only one 

 is free (Oriental despotism) to the notion that only 

 some are free (Greeks and Eomans), and from that again 

 to the notion that all men are free. The second im- 

 portant conception is that embodied in the ' History of 

 Philosophy,' in which Hegel tries to show how the 

 progress of thought in the different stages of ancient 



' Critiques. ' Among these exposi- 

 tions the writings of Paulsen and of 

 Hoffding, quoted on former occasions 

 (see ante, vol. iii. pp. 28, 340 and 

 284, 317), are specially concise and 

 luminous. The earlier biographies 

 of Hegel, notably those of Rosen - 

 kranz (1844) and Haym (1857), 

 already contained much informa- 

 tion on Hegel's mental develop- 

 ment prior to his Jena period. The 

 most interesting study, however, 

 is that of Dilthey, " Die Jugend- 

 geschichte Hegels," published in 

 the ' Transactions ' of the Berlin 

 Academy (1905). Two subjects 



seem to have prominently occupied 

 Hegel's mind. The first and more 

 important was theological and his- 

 torical, dealing with the Christian 

 religion, its founders and its rela- 

 tion to philosophical or natural re- 

 ligion. But not less interestingis the 

 fact that we possess two distinctly 

 political treatises on the Constitu- 

 tion of Wiirtemburg, his native 

 country, and on the Constitution of 

 Germany. This shows that Hegel 

 was better prepared to deal with 

 the political and historical sides of 

 the social problem than any of his 

 three distinguished predecessors. 



