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Updated: July 16, 2025
But it was the book on Aesthetics that charmed me most of all. It was easy to understand, and yet weighty, superabundantly rich. Again and again while reading Hegel's works I felt carried away with delight at the new world of thought opening out before me.
The paternal function of government, the right of the state to interfere in matters beyond its traditional range, its duty with regard to education all this was quite contrary to the prevailing habits of thought of the time, especially at Manchester, the headquarters of the laissez faire school; but to Ruskin, who, curiously enough, had just then been referring sarcastically to German philosophy, knowing it only at second-hand, and unaware of Hegel's political work to him this Platonic conception of the state was the only possible one, as it is to most people nowadays.
During this period Hegel's views, consciously or unconsciously, penetrated the different sciences, and saturated popular literature and the daily press from which the ordinary so-called cultured classes derive their mental pabulum. But this victory down the whole line was only preliminary to a conflict within its own ranks.
For I so admired Hegel's powerful mind that it seemed to me he was the very keystone of all philosophical thought. The well-known and stirring lyrical style of the author greatly fascinated me as a layman.
Hegel's upper end 'loses itself in light; the lower end, qui voit tant de choses, as La Fontaine's shepherd says, is not 'a sublime mental phase, and capable of conveying general truths. Time and space do not thwart the consciousness at Hegel's lower end, which springs from 'the great soul of nature. But that lower end, though it may see for Jeanne d'Arc at Valcouleurs a battle at Rouvray, a hundred leagues away, does not communicate any lofty philosophic truths.
The nature of dialectic might be curiously illustrated by reference to Hegel's Logic; and though to approach the subject from Hegel's satirical angle is not, perhaps, quite honest or fair, the method has a certain spice. Hegel, who despised mathematics, saw that in other departments the instability of men's meanings defeated their desire to understand themselves.
Often at home, when I was compelled to hear reproofs on what they call a want of study, I had sat deep into the night, and had studied history in Hegel's Philosophy of History. I said nothing of this, or other studies, or they would immediately have been spoken of, in the manner of an instructive lady, who said, that people justly complained that I did not possess learning enough.
Strauss at least wishes to extricate himself from the mire, and he is already partly out of it; still, he is very far from being on dry land, and he still shows signs of having stammered Hegel's prose in youth. In those days, possibly, something was sprained in him, some muscle must have been overstrained.
Hegel's great idea, which Proudhon appropriated, and which he demonstrates with wonderful ability in the "System of Economical Contradictions," is as follows: Antinomy, that is, the existence of two laws or tendencies which are opposed to each other, is possible, not only with two different things, but with one and the same thing.
What these categories are and what Hegel's procedure is in showing their necessary sequential development, can here not even be hinted at. That the logical development of the categories of thought is the same as the historical evolution of life and vice versa establishes for Hegel the identity of thought and reality.
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