OF THE GOOD. 193 



even sociological, it was rather metaphysical. This as. 



Hegel and 



enterprise was an attempt to see in the different stages ^histori- 

 cal problem. 



of human culture, in the great civilisations of the East, 

 of classical antiquity, of the middle ages and of modern 

 times, the working of that larger and deeper intelligence 

 which underlies and manifests itself in all that is living 



O 



and moving. He did not therefore look at the events and 

 phenomena of history from the outside ; he did not study 

 the life of mankind like that of an organism, as Comte 

 did. He started with the conviction that the intellectual 

 agency termed the Absolute, and ultimately identified 

 with the Divine Spirit, was unfolding or realising itself 

 not only in the minds of individual men (the Self of 

 Fichte), nor yet only in the regions of nature and 

 mind as two complementary opposites (as Schelling 

 held), but that it manifests itself also and pre-eminently 

 in historical creations such as the State, Society, the 

 Church, Art, Eeligion, and Science : the last in its highest 

 forms he identified with Philosophy. 



Thus Hegel's first great work was a combination of 

 psychology and history, throwing light into the recesses 

 of the individual human mind as well as upon the life of 

 humanity, of the objective mind. It was an interpreta- 

 tion of the facts of the mental life of man and mankind. 

 Where Comte saw only the contest of two organic forces, 

 Egoism and Altruism, not further to be explained, Hegel 

 saw the manifestations of an underlying reality re- 

 vealed and known to man primarily within his own self- 

 consciousness : the life of the Absolute. From this 

 point of view he wrote his Phenomenology of the 

 Mind, and later on the different parts of his compre- 



VOL. IV. N 



