ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 95 



velopment. This is (in part at least) the significance of the 

 dictum of absolute idealism, that the actual changes and is yet 

 eternal. The infinite organism embraces the whole past and 

 future it is a universal evolution. It is eternal, not as if change 

 were illusory, but because all change is comprehended within it. 



In the philosophy of Hegel a new scientific influence has be 

 come dominant that of the history of civilization. This in 

 fluence, which prior to the middle of the eighteenth century is to 

 be discerned only by careful scrutiny, has by the beginning of 

 the nineteenth relegated to a secondary place the methods and 

 principles of mathematics. In this, as in so many respects, the 

 philosophy of Kant is a turning-point. It is there that one finds 

 the supreme effort of rationalism to interpret the phenomena of 

 human progress in terms derived from the study of mechanics 

 to make a morality that simulates the uniformity of natural law 

 square with a humanity that has passed up from savagery to 

 civilization and is still climbing. In absolute idealism, the inter 

 pretation of progress operates by means of categories to which it 

 has itself given rise, and by which, in turn, even the theories of 

 quantity and number are dominated. In other words, absolute 

 idealism is a philosophy of evolution the philosophy of evolution 

 par excellence, its advocates would say. 



The significance of the revolution thus accomplished it is diffi 

 cult to overestimate. It is not simply a shifting of interest 

 from one science to another. It marks the emergence of a higher 

 ideal of human wisdom. The oldest division of the accumulated 

 learning of man, the division upon which all further specialization 

 has rested, is that between history and philosophy; and this 

 division has persisted, without any effectual attempt to overcome 

 it unless the work of Aristotle be an exception down almost 

 to our own day. It is the cleft between the individual and the 

 universal, between the curiosity that would fain know the for 

 tunes of men and things in all the fulness of their concrete particu 

 larity, and the curiosity which is not to be satisfied by mere 



