198 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



42. leading aspect to which I referred above. It is the idea 



This move- 

 ment pro- of Development, which underlies, as much as that of 



moted by 



DeVeiop. f Freedom, the whole of Hegel's philosophy, and really 

 unfits it in the eyes both of friend and foe to become the 

 support of an immovable orthodoxy in religious, social, 

 and political questions alike. This principle of develop- 

 ment has, as I have had frequent occasion to remark, 

 assumed many forms and appeared in many versions. 

 In Hegel's philosophy it appeared as the movement and 

 development of human thought itself, which was identified 

 with the world-process. There can be no doubt that, to 

 Hegel himself, it meant the movement of the Divine 

 Spirit in the life of the individual and of humanity. But 

 critical thinkers soon discovered that no logical proof ex- 

 isted for this interpretation, but that the idea that human 

 thought in the individual or the race was expressive or 

 symbolical of something underlying, was itself a purely 

 human idea, a creation or fiction of the human intellect. 

 The formula of Hegel, that philosophy was the true 

 Theodicy, was therefore reversed, and it was taught that, 

 on the contrary, the theological interpretation was merely 

 an exaltation and idolising, an apotheosis of human 

 thought itself. 



These two opposite interpretations of Hegel's system 

 were given to the world, the former in 1832, within 

 a year from Hegel's death ; the latter not long after, in 



43. the year 1835. The former, representing the orthodox 



Goschel, 



strauss, and and conservative interpretation, was by K. Fr. Goschel, 



Feuerbach. ' 



with the title ' The Monism of Thought,' the latter by 

 David Friedrich Strauss in his 'Life of Jesus.' But 

 the thinker who applied the Hegelian idea of develop- 

 ment not only to a special question, that of the origin 



