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Then the Hegelian, with his Notion, and the Darwinian, with his notions, and the Lotzian, with his Broad Church mixture of Religion and Evolution, and the Spencerian, with that Absolute which is a sort of a something, might all be offered with their divers wares; and cheaply enough, Lucian, you would value them in this auction of Sects.

One may imagine what an immense effect the Hegelian philosophy produced in the philosophy-dyed atmosphere of Germany. The triumph lasted for ten years and by no means subsided with the death of Hegel. On the contrary, from 1830 to 1840 Hegelianism was exclusively supreme and had fastened itself upon its opponents to a greater or less degree.

Hegel's mode of procedure being thus essentially suicidal, the Hegelian classification which depends upon it falls to the ground. Let us consider next that of M. Comte. As all his readers must admit, M. Comte presents us with a scheme of the sciences which, unlike the foregoing ones, demands respectful consideration.

Human life, under the discipline of letters and common schools, is not thus Hegelian, but advances under the boundless retrospection of literature. And yet this is probably divine philosophy.

Whichever way we look we discover Herr Duehring to be in possession of Hegelian lore which he gives forth without any embarrassment as his own fundamental philosophy. It would be too long a task to find out here just how far the application of the ideas of purpose is correctly stated and applied to the organic world.

"Now this last phenomenon should indeed surprise them; it should remind them of that allied, slowly understood tendency of a philosophy which was formerly promoted for reasons of State, namely, the tendency of the Hegelian philosophy: yea, it would perhaps be no exaggeration to say that, in the subordination of all strivings after education to reasons of State, Prussia has appropriated, with success, the principle and the useful heirloom of the Hegelian philosophy, whose apotheosis of the State in this subordination certainly reaches its height."

Exactly the same thing appeared to be the case with the Hegelian doctrine, in a greater degree, and also in the special instance of the Malthusian doctrine. Hegelianism was, apparently, occupied only with its logical constructions, and bore no relation to the life of mankind. Precisely this seemed to be the case with the Malthusian theory. It appeared to be busy itself only with statistical data.

Granted that the Past is that which no longer has any existence, only the Present could ever be real now; as the Present and the Past cannot co-exist, the Past evidently never existed at all; unless, indeed, we call in the aid of the Hegelian philosophy, and set our minds at ease by a fine reduction of contraries, to the effect that since the Present and the Past exclude one another, they evidently must really be the same thing at bottom.

The coexistent individual and social property, this confused and indefinite thing, this nonsense proceeding from the Hegelian dialectic, this misty world, this deep dialectic puzzle which Marx leaves his pupils to solve is merely a creation of Herr Duehring's imagination.

The doctrine that might makes right, the conception of state as supreme, the belief in the divine right of kings, the belief in the ordained rights of aristocracy, belief in militarism as a social institution, the doctrine that life may be controlled by reason, all intellectual pessimism, skepticism, any form of concept-worship, whether Hegelian or other, acceptance of the methods of science and the results of science as applicable to all the problems of life all such principles which inhabit the region, so to speak, between philosophy and the practical life manifestly have some relation to the spirit of war.